Red Sea International Film Festival 2022

<p>Kazem, an elderly film-maker, (Behrouz Allahverdizadeh) tried to shoot a documentary 20 years before this film takes place in a remote Azeri village where the women, who were all childless, were presumed to be sterile. His film was never completed: the village women, anxious to preserve their dignity, burnt the footage. Two decades later, when it is established that it is the men who were and are infertile, Kazem decides to go back with his camera. Iranian director Reza Jamali paints a lively picture of what happens when a film-making circus comes to a small town, peering through windows and asking intrusive questions, while also exploring the male suspicion of women that goes back to Adam and Eve. His imaginary village is like a social fishbowl, where these divisions are very visible. Not at all imaginary, however, are the gorgeous mountains and valleys of the surrounding countryside, used by Jamali to spectacular effect.</p>

<p>Deadpan humour may not be the first thing we associate with stories about doomed love or struggling refugees, but director Wissam Charaf&rsquo;s second feature &ndash; winner of the Europa Cinemas Prize in Venice this year - is imbued with a wry sense of human absurdity. Ahmed (Ziad Jallad) fled from Syria to survive on the streets of Beirut by selling scrap metal. Mehdia (Clara Couturet) is Ethiopian, working as a housekeeper for an elderly middle-class couple who leave her in no doubt as to how expendable she is; nevertheless, she is a buoyant spirit, determined to find a better life together with Ali. Getting in the way of their love story is the legacy of an old war wound, a mysterious infestation of metal filings that Ali keeps shedding, turning him into a sickly version of the Tin Man. Funny and serious by unexpected turns, Charaf&rsquo;s film is full of stylistic surprises. This film is supported by the Red Sea Fund.</p>

<p>Taha and his younger brother As&#39;ad (Wissam Diyaa) scrape a living searching for discarded metals and plastics at the vast, stinking Baghdad rubbish dump ironically named for the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The dump section reserved for refuse from the US military regularly yields girlie magazines, which As&#39;ad, who is only twelve, with a mix of innocence and the toughness he has needed to survive, sells off page-by-page on the sly. As&#39;ad hits the jackpot - and causes a huge rift with his older brother - when he brings home a discarded rubber doll. He cleans up the intimacy toy tenderly, then puts it to work in a makeshift brothel. Working with a local cast, director Ahmed Yassin Al-Daradji tells an intimate, affectionate and often humorous story of kids growing up, making some hard points about the corrosive effects of poverty and consumerism along the way. This film is supported by the Red Sea Fund.</p>

<p>Harka is an impassioned plea for social justice set in Sidi Bouzid, the Tunisian city where the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in 2010 triggered the Jasmine Revolution. The thriller contains a powerhouse performance from French-Tunisian actor Adam Bessa as Ali, an impoverished street-seller whose predicament is inspired by Bouazizi&#39;s story. Ali sells black market gasoline, risking his life every time he heads into the desert to buy supplies, but he&#39;s obliged to turn over most of his earnings in extortion payments to the police. Burdened by debts since his father&#39;s death and now responsible for his two younger sisters, he has to beg his brother &ndash; who has escaped the family to work as a waiter at a tourist hotel &ndash; for support. Director Lotfy Nathan&#39;s fictional debut was a stand-out in this year&#39;s Cannes Film Festival&#39;s Certain Regard section, where Bessa won the award for best performance. This film is supported by the Red Sea Fund.</p>

<p>India&rsquo;s official Oscar entry is both a fictional retelling of the director Pan Nalin&rsquo;s boyhood and an ode to cinema itself &ndash; to the films, of course, but also to the theatres and their equipment, which Nalin&rsquo;s young hero loves just as much. Inevitably, despite being made of sterner stuff, it will draw comparisons to Giuseppe Tornatore&rsquo;s enduringly popular Cinema Paradiso. Like Tornatore&rsquo;s alter ego Salvatore, nine-year-old Samay grows up poor, the son of a Gujarati railway tea-seller. His escape is a cinema called the Galaxy &ndash; which is hours away, but that doesn&rsquo;t deter him &ndash; where the projectionist Fazal (Bhavesh Shrimali) lets him watch films from his booth; Samay even builds his own hand-cranked projector from a cardboard box. Nalin gives his story an added dimension of poignancy by updating it to 2010, when his beloved tunnels of light were on the brink of being replaced by digital servers.</p>

<p>Jabai, aged 11, lives with his family in a small village in Kazakhstan. His father is possibly the most eco-conscious petrol station owner in Kazakhstan; Jabai helps out by selling mountain onions along the highway. It has never occurred to him that his parents could be anything but happy until he catches a glimpse of his mother fornicating with a truck driver, a man he has always regarded as a hero. This is an unacceptable situation; Jabai resolves to fix it. With his little sister Saniya, he sets out for a remote corner of China to obtain what he has heard is the only thing that will help his father regain his rightful position as the man of the family, the so-called &ldquo;golden Viagra&rdquo;. Full of popping colour, Eldar Shibanov&rsquo;s first feature &ndash; inspired by his own parents&rsquo; divorce and sponsored by the Biennale College in Venice &ndash; is touching, funny, visually appealing and altogether adorable.</p>

<p>Angolan director Ery Claver spins an allegory of modern Africa from this fable about a Chinese merchant&rsquo;s imported plastic model of the Virgin Mary and the quite miraculous ripple effect it has on members of a poor community grasping for answers. &ldquo;The Chinese did a beautiful thing,&rdquo; says a puffed-up barber, who sees an opportunity to branch out from cutting beards by starting a cult. Amongst others, the icon affects Domingas, a mother in mourning whose roof is weeping more than she is; Zoyo, who is searching for his missing dog. The Marian cult is a legacy of the Portuguese, of course, but its exploitation is open to all comers in an era of runaway globalisation. That unholy muddle of influences is reflected by the film&rsquo;s succession of styles, visibly clashing as Claver ramps up the sense of a discordant urban nightmare. A truly remarkable and surprising journey into Africa.</p>

<p>Saudi director Mohamed Al Salman&#39;s feature film debut expands on the themes of his previous short films, focusing on an ostensibly ordinary character who is gradually revealed to be remarkable. At the age of 30, Nasser (Ibrahim Alkhairallah) is drifting, convinced his father doesn&#39;t understand him. His life comes into sharp focus, however, when he is diagnosed with a brain tumor. At the same time, he meets and becomes infatuated with a striking but enigmatic young woman and must make some rapid decisions before he undergoes risky neurosurgery. Somehow, he must find a way to reach this young woman before it&#39;s too late. Friends offer him advice on how to capture her heart, all of it terrible. Perhaps she can be wooed with a song? It&#39;s an unusual, very confident and stylish film; Mohamed Al Salman is a filmmaker to watch.</p>

<p>After seven years in prison, 35-year-old Geoffrey (Justin Mirichii) is released into the care of a Catholic priests&rsquo; compound in Shimoni, a small and sleepy village in rural Kenya. As we shall discover, Geoffrey knows this place - all too well - as &ldquo;the pit&rdquo;. A revered English teacher before his time inside, he now does his farmyard chores, attends church services as required and maintains a distance from other residents. Not that he ever goes anywhere else; some unnamed fear prevents him from stepping outside the gate. Then a man with a distinctive white patch of hair appears, terrifying him so much that he wets himself. Weru (Daniel Njoroge) has haunted his dreams for decades. Now he can&rsquo;t face him. Film editor Angela Wanjiku&rsquo;s gripping directorial debut explores the ways in which memory and emotion seize control of the body, which in turn may speak when words fail.</p>

<p>This spectacular account of a young man making his way through the desert is one of the first Saudi films to have been shot at NEOM, the new development in the northwest of the kingdom. Director Moe Alatawi tells the story of Snam, a 23-year-old tobacco merchant who breaks away from his trading convoy in order to get home quickly to his village, where his wife is about to have their first child. Now traveling alone, he&#39;s ambushed by thieves who leave him for dead. His journey has become a quest to survive, with the added threat of a wolf dogging his footsteps. Tormented by his memories, he struggles to hold on to his sanity in this vast, lonely, but also inspiring wilderness.</p>

<p>Maine and her family are accompanying her father&rsquo;s coffin to the small Moroccan village where he is to be buried. Tomorrow, the men will take the body to the cemetery while the women, in accordance with tradition, wait at home. That is not something Maine can accept, however. She is determined to go with her father to his final resting place.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

<p>Set in 1987, a young black Saudi man attempts to impress a girl by mimicking the music video of Crown, an iconic singer from that time.</p>

<p>A Syrian builder in Beirut decides to replace a colleague who died in an accident in a towering, hazardous crane. Dozens of metres above the city, away from prying eyes, he experiences the freedom no one grants him elsewhere. His deepest essence breaks through spectacularly.</p>