The two long films are the Lebanese artist-filmmaker Rania Stephan’s experimental The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011, nominated for the best documentary award at the 2012 Chicago International Film Festival), and the Egyptian director Ahmed Nour’s Waves (2012), another experimental piece that combines archival imagery with live footage and animation to tell the story of Suez, Nour’s hometown, which won the Cinema in Motion Award at the 2012 San Sebastián International Film Festival and the Jury Prize for best sound at the 2015 Moscow International Documentary Film Festival DOKer and was nominated for best documentary feature at the 2014 Carthage Film Festival and the Muhr Arab Award for best documentary at the 2013 Dubai International Film Festival. Running Dec 7-14, DIFF screened a total of 156 films from 55 territories and in 44 languages, 57 of which were world or international premieres.The first week’s programme includes 20 tracks from 10 albums and five films, three of which are shorts: the Egyptian Mohammad Shawky Hassan’s documentary And on a Different Note (2015), the Egyptian Salma El Tarzi’s music documentary Underground/On the Surface (2013), and the Lebanese Chadi Aoun’s animation Silence (2016). Mohammed Alholayyil’s 300KM, about the complicated journey of an unrelated man, woman and child in a small car across Saudi Arabia, won the jury prize while Bader Alhomoud’s The Bliss of Being No One clinched the best film. The section for short films out of the Gulf was dominated by Saudi Arabia. Lebanese director Mounia Akl - one of Screen’s first Arab Stars of Tomorrow this year - won the jury prize for Submarine, set in a world awash with rubbish. Barsaoui’s We Are Just Fine Like This, about an elderly man who is dreading being care for by his daughter, won best short film.
In the shorts section, Tunisian director Mehdi M. It was one of the strongest Emirati competitions since the creation of DIFF, featuring five features and seven short films. Shatha Masoud won best short film for Mamsous, in which three artists speak candidly about their personal battles with depression and anxiety. Yaser Alneyadi won best director for Shrimp about a group of people bought together under absurd circumstances.
In the section devoted to local cinema, Abdulla Al Kaabi won best feature for his daring Only Men Go To The Grave, tackling themes of gender identity and homosexuality in Arab society. Lebanon’s Julia Kassar won best actress for her performance in Tramontaneas as the mother of a blind man who sets off across rural Lebanon in search of his real identity after discovering his ID card is forged.
It was the second win for Rehab at DIFF this year after she shared the top prize at the festival’s co-financing market the Dubai Film Connection (DFC) for her upcoming documentary The Great Family about an adopted French woman who discovers she may be the daughter of Palestinian refugees.Įgyptian Mohammed Hammed won best director for Withered Green, which is about an insular, conservative young woman acting as a guardian for her younger sister, facing up to the complications of living alone without a male in the household in Egypt’s patriarchal society.īest actor went to Egypt’s Ali Sobhi for his performance in Ali, The Goat, And Ibrahim as a young man in love with his pet goat Nada, who sets off on a journey of self-discovery across Egypt. Lebanese film-maker Eliane Raheb’s Those Who Remain, about an elderly farmer determined to remain on his remote mountain farm, defying age and the political tensions around him, won the jury prize. The prize for best non-fiction feature went to Lebanese film-maker Maher Abi Samra’s A Maid For Each, capturing the inner workings of a Beirut employment agency supplying Asian and African domestic staff. The feature revolves around a young Yazidi couple - Reko and Pero - who are separated on the eve of their wedding when ISIS fighters attack their village. Kurdish director Hussein Hassan’s drama The Dark Wind, about a Yazidi community attacked by Isis fighters, has won best fiction feature in the central Muhr Feature competition devoted to Arab cinema at the 13th edition of the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF).
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