Discoveries from Saudi Arabia World Cinema

A middle-aged woman is driven to take drastic action when she learns that her husband plans to take a second, younger wife.

The Story of Milk and Honey is a short experimental video belonging to a larger project, which includes photographs, drawings and text, detailing an unnamed individual’s failure to write a love story about the Levant, as if it were a classical Arabic song. Through voiceover narration that weaves together images, letters, and songs, a story of defeat transpires into a journey that explores how we collect and perceive information, understand facts, history, images, and sound and where the individual is to be found in the midst of the material.

In a seaside city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia an old man tells the story of first soccer club Al Ittihad to a young man, taking him from the late 20's when the club established and how they shape up a team against all the odds and the story continues till the early 70's where the team faced major issues and how the club and its men dealt with it.

A man trying to find the real meaning of the place called home or which place he should call it as he has lived his youth abroad and now is having a hard time settling in his home country where he was born.

“Rahal” immigrated to Europe forty years ago. Scandalized by the behavior of his eldest son who participated in a heist, he decides to return to Morocco for good. In his native country, “Rahal” intends to take matters into his own hands. Events take another detour.

The lives of four Syrian families, resettled in Baltimore and under a deadline to become self-sufficient in eight months.

In what is left of the city of Jaffa, a man about to lose his house contemplates his fate. Meanwhile two women remain tied to their homes. Cats scrabbling her front door, one finds solace feeding her old mother, until her house is taken over by an Israeli film crew. The other immerses herself in dreams of love whilst making wedding decorations. In a nearby café an old captain sits motionless the whole day through, while another man moves restless like a fish in an aquarium. For these Palestinian characters this is a way of life, holding onto hope through their own rituals.

Humaid, struggling with psychological issues that prevent him from interacting with the world, finds an unexpected way to cope with his problems without resolving them.

Sacred explores cultural and religious ritual as it relates to life’s cycles: birth, adolescence, marriage, aging and other key passages of life.

A documentary film that tells about the last events in the era of Egyptian President Sadat, the hero of war and peace, and the story of his assassination.

Anthology film portraying the stories from the collection Sleepless Nights by Ali Douagi.

A documentary that highlights the role played by artist Adel Emam in conveying his messages about the political and social issues that Egypt went through over more than 60 years during his artistic career.

The events revolve around a three-person gang led by Abu Al-Ghawar (Duraid Lahham), who plans to steal Simon Bay, and the gang members succeed in deceiving him and stealing his locker. Whereas the husband of his sister (Nihad al-Qala'i) is a person who has many problems and disputes with the people of the region due to the mockery of the people of the region of Abu al-Ghawar Who uses this money to do amazing inventions that have no use.

In a farm in the North, lives a saddened family : the grandfather, the mother locked in his memories, and two twin children. Their daughter Malika drowned in the village river, seven years ago, according to their belief, but in reality she left with a man. Only Mohamed, her husband, knows the truth. Death will come, in the guise of a beautiful woman wearing white, bringing anxiety to this peaceful home; she comes to pick up Mohamed, this one will be spared by the children... That night, Mohamed reports from the river a young stranger, Hiba, who will replace little by little Malika... ... During the festival of Achoura, Death returns. Is it for Hiba?

A man called for a fake trip to Dream Island and succeeds to fraud 6 young people into his plans and things turn to an unexpected way.

Khalid and Kehailan are two team leaders who are passionate about car racing and challenges. They enter into a crazy competition to win the challenge involving a lot of surprises, which unexpectedly change both their lives.

Mohammed, the son of a simple worker, lives in the city of Alexandria with his father and dreams of moving to Cairo to become a filmmaker. In Cairo, Mohammed meets Salma and Bassam and is impressed by their self-confidence. When he discovers that Salma and Bassam’s parents were left-wing activists from the 1970s, he looks for a similar sense of purpose in his own father’s life. As he compares lives, Mohammed the filmmaker discovers answers. More importantly, he is led to new questions that connect the past with the present.

After losing their restaurant in the capital, Fatma and her husband Ibrahim are forced to run another restaurant in the desert. But in this universe of sand they meet Mokhtar, a wizard capable of digging up treasures that have been buried underground for centuries.

A love story between a blind man who dreams of being a TV presenter and a young film student, despite everything that opposes them.

Panoptic explores Lebanon's schizophrenia. Depicting a nation thriving for modernity while ignoring the vices preventing it from achieving its goal, director Rana Eid examines this paradox through sound, iconic monuments and secret hideouts.

Hasan Hourani, a Palestinian poet and illustrator, died aged 29 in Jaffa while trying to rescue his nephew from the sea. Shortly after, the filmmaker Mais Darwazah discovers his drawings and poems and feels drawn to Hourani's world— a universe outside space and time; a place of wonder, discovery, and freedom. Motivated by this kinship, Darwazah embarks on a journey to her homeland, Palestine: a place she has never known.

In four long takes, like a haiku in black and white, we enter the rubble of a country following the 2006 Israeli-Lebanese conflict. Without ever looking death in the face, the absence of life shows itself over the course of clues appearing in the no man’s land of a battered Beirut. In silent, frozen time, the film subtly refers to the spectator’s imagination in alluding to death.

A musical comedy about the life of a man exposed to a financial crisis that led him to try to force his niece to marry a rich man despite her love for a poor man.

Through mordant social commentary and symbolic irony, Amiralay focuses this film on the chicken farming industry in the rural Syrian village of Sadad. He documents the burdened livelihoods of farmers and the economic policies of the government that encouraged industrial egg productions rather than artisanal trades, a switch that ultimately led to the plight of the Sadad's rural peasant class.

When a traveling fish vendor refuses to accept the death of his close friend, he embarks on a mysterious journey to find him, plunging into a world of illusions and psychological conflicts that turn his life upside down.

A man gets to taste what it was like back "home" reconnecting with his loved ones and the city he grew up in before he leaves it once again. His memories recollecting the experience blurred the line of where he's supposed to belong.

Michel, a French national, lives in the Riad adjoining the house of Boujemâa and turns it into a guest house. The noise resulting from the tourist activities and songs of the rooster poisons the relations between the two neighbors.

Zeineb, thirty, is happy to divorce, she thinks it will be her door to freedom. Mhamed, an archaeologist, imagines that emigration will be his door to the future. His chance encounter with Zeineb, his first love, plunges him into dreams that oppose his plans. Ali, coming back from America, his head full of ideas and calculations, wants to shine at all costs. In an American convertible, the three go south to Metlaoui.

Returning to his old neighborhood before its demolition, Ahmed revisits memories. As he wanders its streets, he recalls something that forever changed the way he sees the place he once called home

50 Meters features Yomna the female director making her debut film about her father and his water aerobics team, a group of men over sixty, as her way to approach her father in a confined pool. Will she be able to regain her own life narrative, find reconciliation and move forward with her life choices in such a patriarchal society

The film counts the return trip of thirty Moroccan immigrants from their country of emigration to their home country in a bus. It tells the several events happening among a group of people forced to coexist in a single, narrow space despite the differences of their worlds and their cultural backgrounds.

A young Palestinian girl will do whatever it takes to buy a birthday cake.

The first documentary to present an unabashed critique of the impact of the Syrian government’s agricultural and land reforms, Everyday Life in a Syrian Village delivers a powerful jab at the state’s conceit of redressing social and economic inequities.

As he is walking back home after his team has lost a game, a football fan meets a stray dog. Ali will spend several hours with the dog wandering through a freezing cold Tunis.

Somewhere, amid a tangle of borders, a refugee camp. People trapped in a situation that becomes more absurd every day, trying to live a human existence. We don't see their faces. We don't see the places they talk about. However, we are drawn very close to their intimate experience of the world as we follow, line by line, the maps they are drawing to represent the complexity of the spaces around them.

Cranes hold a special place in various cultures around the world, symbolizing purity, loyalty, and longevity. With their dazzling dances and timeless, soulful songs, cranes have become synonymous with beauty and faithfulness. They are seen as creatures of deep emotion and attachment, remaining devoted to their mates and caring for their young, which has earned them recognition and celebration in art.

The greatest film ever about an innocent boy trying to have some fun

Work on a range of comedy show events deals with conflict and differences between the rich and the poor.

In the Al-Fareej neighborhood on the shores of the sea in the United Arab Emirates, a young man named Mansour and a girl named Kaltham are in the prime of their lives. Mansour is in love with Kaltham and tries in every way to get her attention. When he finds the best way to do so is by buying her a gift, he finds himself in a predicament of having to come up with the money to buy it.

Algiers, 2015. Adlan and Terrorist navigate the Sacré Coeur neighborhood, desperately trying to make a few dinars.

Disillusioned with his life in the suburbs of segregated Beirut, Omar's unusual discovery lures him into the depth of the city. Immersed into a world that is so close yet so isolated from his reality, he finds himself struggling to keep his attachments, his sense of home.

After he completed his mandatory military service, the filmmaker was held in retention as the revolution unfurled in his country. His military rank was that of a sergeant. During these times, he would go back to his home, located in the middle of Damascus city, take off his military uniform and return to his normal life, working as an assistant director with his friend, the filmmaker Mohammed Malas. To make sense of this schizophrenic situation, he decides to take his camera and start shooting a ‘making-of’ that will eventually go beyond Malas’s film.

Mokhtar, a filmmaking professor, receives an unexpected gift on his 75th birthday from his daughter Kawthar, a filmmaker in her early twenties. With two plane tickets to Rome, they set out in search of his long lost love - Patrizia - the woman he promised to return to thirty-three years ago. Being filmed unknowingly throughout the trip, Mokhtar's raw emotions are captured by his daughter's hidden camera. As voyeurs to this quest for love, we are immersed in the lives of the father and daughter, and the triumphs and tribulations they experience during their trip.

A comic play about an elderly, intelligent and tongue father and his sons who are seeking his satisfaction and strictly execute his orders to reach the legacy that is kept inside an old iron bag.

The film revolves around a wife couple working in the field of dries and the husband working in a bank but because of the husband's strict treatment and implementation of his views, the wife decided to raise the case to take him off.

In Mauritania, a country seemingly bound by tradition and male dominance, three women speak freely about sex, love and money.