For filmmakers with some connection to the Middle East and North Africa September has been the month of giving – or rather receiving – as SANAD, the Abu Dhabi film fund, made two grants announcements in as many days.
As the Venice Film Festival wound down Friday, SANAD announced the results of the inaugural edition of the Final Cut in Venice workshop.
A competition-based postproduction support initiative the festival launched in partnership with the fund, Final Cut in Venice was created to support projects from Africa, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. To facilitate co-production and distribution opportunities, the workshop distributed working copies of selected films to producers, buyers, distributors and film festival programmers.
Tunisian writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania won the workshop’s prize for Best Arab Film for her project “Zaineb Hates the Snow” (Zaineb Takrahou Ethelj). Ben Hania made an impression upon critics in 2014-15 with her mocumentary “Challat Tunis.”
Her new feature follows the story of 9-year-old Zaineb who, after losing her father in an accident, is informed that her mother will marry a man living in Canada. The grant is worth a little over $11,000.
Ben Hania received two additional grants. One of approximately $6,500, from London’s Sub-Ti Ltd., will fund the production of a subtitled Digital Cinema Package master. The second, worth just under $5,500, is for the purchase of two-year broadcasting rights by Rai Cinema. Further support was promised by Amiens International Film Festival and Fribourg International Film Festival.
Also participating in the Final Cut workshop was Sherif Elbendary’s feature “Ali, the Goat and Ibrahim.” It tells the story of Ali, who believes the soul of his deceased girlfriend, Nada, has transmigrated to a goat. While visiting a traditional healer, Ali meets Ibrahim, a depressed sound engineer who hears “voices” he cannot decipher.
The project was awarded a postproduction grant of a little over $11,000, offered by Paris’ Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée to be spent in France. Two more postproduction grants, each of a little over $11,000, were offered by Knightworks and Paris’ Titra TVS.
“House in the Fields” by Moroccan writer-director Tala Hadid, received a $16,000 postproduction grant from Rome’s Laser Film, while Iraq’s Hakar Abdulqadir was awarded distribution support for his project “Separation.”
The day before the workshop results went public, SANAD had announced the recipients of its 2015 tranche of grants. The fund disbursed development and postproduction grants to 20 projects from the Arab world, selected from a record 178 submissions.
Three Lebanese projects were in the roster – one in postproduction, two more in development.
UMAM Documentation and Research founders Monika Borgmann, Lokman Slim won a postproduction grant for their new documentary “Tadmor.”
As filmmakers Borgmann and Slim are known for their collaboration in the 2005 doc “Massaker,” which focuses on six of the men who took part in 1982’s infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres. In “Tadmor,” eight Lebanese men recall, and re-enact, the years of physical and psychological abuse they endured in Tadmor, Baathist Syria’s most notorious prison.
Among the films winning development grants is “The Notebooks,” the new project of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The feature-length fiction recounts the arrival of a parcel of notebooks and other memorabilia exchanged between Maia and her friend Carine in 1980s Beirut. Maia has no interest in the package or its contents. It’s a different story for her 13-year-old daughter Alex.
Another development grant went to “The Disappeared,” a documentary by Lebanon’s Yasmin Fedda.
Her “Queens of Syria” won the Black Pearl award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival in 2014.
Her new project seeks to put a human face to the estimated 50,000 Syrians who have disappeared or gone missing after arrest, kidnapping and displacement by regime, opposition and other factions.
SANAD was pleased to announce that 50 percent of the grant-winners are female. Reading through a national lens, Tunis was the big winner, with five projects receiving development or postproduction grants.
This session’s grant winners include several familiar faces in regional filmmaking circles – Algerian director Merzak Allouache (whose “Mother Courage” screened at Venice this year), Palestinian writer-director Annemarie Jacir’s third film, Tunis’ Nejib Belkadhi and Leyla Bouzid (whose “As I Open My Eyes” was programmed at Venice and Toronto), Egypt’s Tahani Rached and Hala Lotfy and Iraq’s Kasim Abid, whose “The Mirrors of Diaspora” tracks down a group of once-young Iraqi artists who left home in the mid-70s to study overseas.
There are also some less familiar faces. The fund is supporting “Five Seasons of Revolution” and “Jellyfish,” two feature-length docs that, respectively, recount stories of Syria’s civil conflict from collective perspectives in Damascus and Zabadani.
“The Forgotten,” the debut feature of Palestinian director Ghada Terawi, will track the numerous contradictions that mark the career of Kozo Okamoto, the Japanese Red Army militant who joined the Palestinian cause, endured years of Israeli detention and was eventually granted honorary Lebanese citizenship.
This round of grants also marks the “coming-out” of award-winning Brazilian artist and filmmaker Karim Ainouz, whose new project “Algerian by Accident” recounts his first encounter with the country his father’s family left for the Americas.
