'The Healer' to Screen at Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation in Jordan

After a successful tour in international film festivals, director Mohamed Zineddaine's film The Healer will screen within the Nights of Arab Cinema programme activities organized by Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation (AHSF) in Jordan, starting from Monday, June 10, to Thursday, June 13.

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The Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation (AHSF) was established in 1978 as a charitable initiative launched by the Arab Bank. The Arab Bank allocated a percentage of its yearly profits to fund the Foundation's establishment to ultimately support the national economy while also pushing forward scientific research, studies in Humanities, cultural enlightenment and innovation. The Foundation has since sought to achieve its objectives through three pillars: thought leadership, literature and arts, and innovation.
 
The Healer is the recipient of the Doha Film Institute Post-Production Grant. It took part in the Festival du Cinéma Africain de Khouribga, and it also won three awards at the National Film Festival of Tangier; Best Female Performance (Fatima Atif), Best Male Performance (Mehdi Laarroubi), and the Jury Award. The film also screened at a number of film festivals, including Luxor African Film Festival, Arab Film Festival Rotterdam, and Marrakech International Film Festival.
 
On the outskirts of Khouribga, a mining town exploiting phosphates, a 16-year old teenager, Abdou, helpful and caring, simple and down to earth, incapable of harm, is anxious to regain the gift of human dignity through learning how to read and write. His adoptive mother Mbarka, a midwife, the neighborhood's healer, protects her privileged status with ways that the laws of obscurantism allow her. Ch'aayba, a thirty-year old guy, uncontrollable and ferociously cynical, is an eccentric pickpocket. Suffering from a skin disease, Abdou convinces him to come see Mbarka in order to get treatment for it: that's how the fate of these three will entangle, twirling on the carrousel of illusion.
 
Directed by Mohamed Zineddaine and written by Olivier Bombarda, the film stars Ahmed Moustafid, Fatima Atif, and Mehdi Laarroubi. MAD Solutions handles the film's distribution in the Arab world.
 
Moroccan filmmaker Mohamed Zineddaine was born in a small village in Morocco called Oued Zem. Since childhood, Zineddaine has been drawn to literary works, so he became an avid reader. In 1983, he left Morocco to move to the city of Nice in France to study Computer Science. However, he soon realized that he was meant for a different path. He travelled to Italy where he took on different jobs, before finally settling in Bologna where he began working as a director, screenwriter and journalist. In 1996, he directed his first documentary film The Old Dancer. Two years later, he finished his first short film The Freudian Family, and in 2005, he directed his debut feature film titled Awakening.