Red Sea International Film Festival 2023

<p>Zaffan goes to a strict girls&rsquo; school in rural Malaysia, where her youthful high spirits &ndash; dancing and climbing trees in the rainforest &ndash; mark her out as a rebel. At 12, she is also the first girl in her class to reach puberty, meaning that her body changes in ways regarded as shameful. When girls start to collapse around her with inexplicable fainting fits, she is identified by teachers as a dark spirit who has cursed the school. Little do they know that she does have a secret self &ndash; one with a tail and teeth. Drawing on the playfully scary spirit of old-school Asian monster movies as well as traditional myths, Tiger Stripes is raw, joyful and buoyed by great performances from its young rookie cast.</p>

<p>Rafik is a desperate man. Released from a Tunisian prison, where he served four years for smashing up the office where he used to work, he is now convinced he can fly and is determined, in the face of his family scepticism, to prove to his young son Yassine that his vision is real. Taking the boy out of school and heading to the mountains, where he finds temporary refuge by invading a bourgeois family&rsquo;s country house, Rafik is clearly mentally unwell. Whether he can fly or not remains an open question, however, cleverly teased by the film-maker and by Majd Mastoura, who is both persuasive and dignified as Rafik.</p>

<p>There she stands, confidently, like a goddess of technological junk, surrounded by endless mountains of rubbish, plastic, stench and rare earths. An angry appeal to the world to take responsibility for the consequences of capitalism, colonialism and environmental destruction in Africa.</p> <p>For our land and bones. At the end of the world.<br /> Technology and waste,<br /> in our lands, our systems, our bones.<br /> Wandering our spaces, she cannot help but wonder, where is the space for healing?</p>

<p>A young woman struggles to find her true self in this short animation. It begins in a realistic domestic sphere within Jeddah. Overwhelmed by societal expectations that dictate how she should look and who she should be, the central character responds by separating into multiple versions of herself, trying on different identities. Ultimately, she escapes from them all &ndash; although that isn&rsquo;t easy either. Her search involves traveling to various states of consciousness, unconsciousness and &ldquo;the in-between&rdquo;. Then her true self emerges, just in time to guide her towards freedom.</p>

<p>Lebanon 1991. On a serenely sunny day, 11-year-old Firas accompanies his father Tayseer, and his father&#39;s friend Rayan, on a bird-hunting trip in the Lebanese mountains. What is initially supposed to be a normal hunting trip turns into an unforgettable adventure.</p>

<p>Pa Kong-Kong is a mysterious man who carries a strange bag on his back, and no one knows what&rsquo;s inside. Ru- mour has it he tortures little thieves, runaways and naughty children. He lives alone in &Ntilde;etty Mbar, a deserted, gloomy market in the suburbs of Dakar where, at night, a terrifying monster-like dog lurks. Binta, a curious and courageous girl, decides to confront Pa Kong-Kong in the middle of the night. She&rsquo;s scared, but determined to prove that her friends were wrong to not pick a girl as their leader. They agree that if she succeeds, she&rsquo;ll become the leader of their little gang.</p>

<p>Three Ghanaian women wake up in a strange land. Each is from a different generation, their experiences reflecting three defining moments in their country&rsquo;s history, but their souls are connected through space, time, and ancestral heritage. As each woman discovers where she is, seeks to find meaning in both that of her own life and that of their young nation, and asks what the future might hold, one thing is very clear: hope must prevail.</p>

<p>A 16-year-old boy is watching pornography for the first time when he realises that the audio has been accidentally connected to his mother&rsquo;s car&rsquo;s Bluetooth. His parents punish him severely and instruct him, without explanation, to repent for his sins. The incident has a profound psychological impact on their son; he feels confused and conflicted but can say nothing because he fears his mother will confiscate his phone and laptop if he questions anything he has been told &ndash; a fear he increasingly resents.</p>

<p>A dilapidated garage on the outskirts of Beirut becomes a microcosm of Lebanon itself &ndash; a country not only questioning its future, but whether a future is even possible &ndash; in this vivid portrait of a car mechanic (Fouad Mahouly) whose customers require fixing as much as their cars. The film observes the daily routine of Fouad&rsquo;s workshop in documentary detail, but it is the lives of the people he offers coffee while their cars are repaired that are the director&rsquo;s focus. Two young men rehearse a play as they wait for their car to be serviced; a woman&rsquo;s life is revealed in a tearful phone conversation and another customer shakes with anxiety, while the financial and social collapse of the country beyond Fouad&rsquo;s yard affects them all. Their collective story, which goes beyond their immediate lives to explore the meaning of existence, unfolds like a dream.</p>

<p>A congress for theoretical physicists in the snow-covered Swiss Alps is the spectacular setting for this truly extraordinary film, which plays with the idea of the multiverse and the infinite possibilities it suggests. Doctoral student Johannes (Jan Bulow) arrives with his disagreeable supervisor, expecting to hear an eminent Iranian scientist talk about his theory of quantum mechanics. But the keynote speaker doesn&rsquo;t show up, another scientist is murdered, strange and apparently poisonous clouds billow overhead and, most mysteriously of all, there are ominous roars coming from tunnels rumoured to run under the mountains. Meanwhile, Johannes is falling for the hotel&rsquo;s enigmatic pianist (Olivia Ross) who seems to know things about him he hasn&rsquo;t told anyone &ndash; not in this universe, anyway.</p>

<p>Heavily pregnant Itto looks forward to a day of peace and quiet when she gets her affluent household mostly to herself after her husband Amine goes away on business. She&rsquo;s quickly lost sight of her modest origins and has adapted to her new family&rsquo;s detached opulence. But when a mysterious state of emergency is declared nationwide, Itto struggles to find help; meanwhile, increasingly ominous events and strange weather phenomena suggest a supernatural presence is nearing. While frantically searching for a way back to Amine, Itto unexpectedly finds emancipation and the possibility of solace in a new world order.</p> <p>Sofia&#39;s&nbsp;astonishing feature debut is an imaginative sci-fi that explores the unsettling circumstances of a world that no longer seems recognizable. With a hypnotic visual sensibility, <em>Animalia</em> explores the tension between faith and purpose, eroding myths and challenging class prejudice to expose the ways we are all more connected than we know.</p>

<p>Two boys are brought up in a sadistic neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. They adopt diverse professional paths, with one of them becoming a photographer and the other boy becoming a drug dealer.</p>