Qutaiba Barhamji

January 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A five-year old girl is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab.

Between light and darkness stands Olfa, a Tunisian woman and the mother of four daughters. One day, her two older daughters disappear. To fill in their absence, the filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actresses and invents a unique cinema experience that will lift the veil on Olfa and her daughters' life stories. An intimate journey of hope, rebellion, violence, transmission and sisterhood that will question the very foundations of our societies.

Women share their innermost secrets and intimate experiences inside an Estonian smoke sauna. Cleansing their bodies and baring their souls, they embrace the healing power of sisterhood.

37-year-old Sara Shahverdi, a motorcycle riding, land owning, former midwife-turned-fierce citizen advocate and recent divorcée, just won a landslide local election in her remote Iranian village and everyone has an opinion about it.

During the Syrian civil war, the district of Yarmouk, home to thousands of Palestinians, became the scene of dramatic and ferocious fighting. The film follows the destiny of civilians during the brutal sieges, imposed by the Syrian regime, that took place in the wake of the battles. With his camera, Abdallah Al-Khatib composes a love song to a place that proudly resists the atrocities of war.

A playful and personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage. It is a love letter to Beirut, spanning 70 years of film, TV, home videos, and photography, exploring the Lebanese collective psyche – marked by joy and intimacy, destruction and loss. Through the eyes of citizens, filmmakers and artists, the film reconstructs a fragmented history in a country without a national archive, celebrating creative expression as both resistance, renewal and a way to preserve memory.

Four years in the life of a Syrian girl in a refugee camp, in a unique film that is just as lively and curious as its protagonist.

Saeed is a young cinephile trying to teach film rules to other young people in Eastern Ghouta, Syria, but the reality they face is too harsh to respect any rules. Saeed’s friend, Milad, is on the other side of the fence; in Damascus, a city under the control of the Assad regime, finishing his studies in Fine Arts. At one point, Milad decides to leave the capital and joins Saeed in a Douma under siege, where they set up a local radio station and a recording studio. They hold the camera to film everything, until one day it is the camera that films them.

A patch of garden on the outskirts of Reims, far, very far from his orchards in Syria. During four seasons, Gevar learns how to farm this new land that waits for no one.

Marusya is 16 and, like many Russian teenagers, is determined to end her life. Then she meets her soulmate in another millennial, Kimi. They spend a decade filming the euphoria and anxiety, the happiness and misery of their youth, muzzled by a violent and autocratic regime in the midst of a “depressed Russia”. This film is a cry from the heart, a tribute to an entire silenced generation.

In the dark night, off the Comoros archipelago, Patron learns how to become « Commandant ». Soon he will take his first clandestine passengers to Mayotte.

The desert is calling. Yet, it is with the ocean that Fabrizio Maltese’s journey begins. He has accepted Abderrahmane Sissako’s invitation to continue the film he and Pol Cruchten had initiated together. Pol has since passed away. The project he had been dreaming of has thus taken on a new, symbolic dimension. It must see the light of day. This is why Fabrizio has traveled on his own to meet with the Mauritanian director. But fate seems to have decided otherwise. From Saint Louis in Senegal to Nouakchott in Mauritania, from Mata Moulana to Chinguetti, Fabrizio allows himself to get lost alone in the desert, with nothing more than a few scribbled notes jotted down on the piece of paper that was given to him by the two filmmakers.

In the Hauts de Mayotte (The Comoro Islands), a secret space, of magic and escape, men and dogs, maintain filial almost intertwined relationships, companion species who share a common land of transformation and autonomy. Smogi has a particular relationship with dogs but also with the power of the elements, nature and the sly spirits that inhabit him (the djinns). “Djo” crosses different belief systems in a wild syncretism where the Muslim call to prayer also marks a moment of reunion with the animist and impure forces of the forest.

Marta, the film's director, faces her fears and digs into the realm of her estranged sister Nastia, a Greek-Catholic nun, to re-evaluate the world they both were brought up in.

Set in the confines of an impoverished Cairo neighborhood, a community's everyday life is threatened by the ruthless rhythms of Tanneries, rotary driers crushing animal skin, hazards of poisonous waste water, Tahyea desperately clings to her brother, Saqr, whose only dream is to escape.

A documentary about Abdulmamad Bekmamadov, also known as Abdul, who came to Russia from Tajikistan to work. He tells the story of his hard life in Moscow through traditional Pamirian tunes.

Three Tajik brothers, Ali, and Kamil Fedor, settled 150 km from Moscow in a makeshift hut, hidden behind a fence. Their life is hard, they speak Russian poorly and live away from their families. Their job is to cut and transport the wood from the forest next door. Every day life is punctuated by the hard work, the daily tasks, card games, drinking and bickering with the Russians in the neighboring village. The film speaks of economic exile, bitter life out of another time, double family for some, and the feeling of not quite here nor longer quite out there…

French poet Thierry Metz killed himself in 1997. He'd moved to the country with his wife and 3 kids but after the youngest is struck dead by a car, the sensitive artist sinks into depression and alcohol, leading to time in a facility.

"With the barrel bombs falling on Ghouta, civilians sought shelter in the basements of their homes. I was one of them, holding on to my camera, I tried to film what I couldn’t express in words."

Since the rooster died, Jasper's only surviving hen has been depressed. Forced to come down from his mountain where he lives far from everything, the septuagenarian sets out in search of company for his beloved gallinaceous bird.

March 2020. Fabrizio, a photographer and filmmaker who lives in Luxembourg, returns to his family in central Italy after his father has suffered a heart attack. It’s the beginning of the pandemic, the country is in lockdown. An intimate diary and an ode to filial love in the face of the most trying circumstances a son can face. A tale of the soul and personal hardship in the context of a broader collective tragedy.

A drama about a 15-year-old teenager Maxim, who obsessively watches his father's mistress. Maxim wants to kill her, not realizing that this only complicates the situation.