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Lebanese Canadian director Katia Jarjoura’s drama Robbing Beirut has received the highest $75,000 in-development prize within the Red Sea Souk undertaking market, presenting 31 characteristic movies and 7 sequence tasks inside Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea International Film Festival.
Set towards the backdrop of Lebanon’s financial disaster, the film revolves round a girl who decides to rob a financial institution after it refuses at hand over her $30,00 financial savings deposit, which she must pay for medical therapy for her sister.
The movie marks Jarjoura’s first fiction characteristic after quite a few documentaries together with Goodbye Murbarak, The Road to Kerbala and most not too long ago, Escape, about Syrian artists dwelling in exile.
Runners-up for the in-development prizes have been Indonesian director Makbul Mubarak’s Watch It Burn, which clinched a $20,000 award, and Afghan director Aboozar Amini’s Tahmina, which received the $20,000 third prize.
Mubarak beforehand made waves with debut movie Autobiography, which premiered in Venice’s Horizons sidebar in 2022, profitable the Fipresci jury prize. His new undertaking follows a Indonesian household struggling to maintain their clove farm afloat as a nickel mining increase of their distant space threatens to destroy their village’s previous lifestyle.
Set towards the backdrop of a wave of suicide assaults on public buildings in Kabul, Tahmina revolves round a girl, who’s secretly a Persian goddess from the Hindu Kush Mountains and has a particular energy for finding physique elements and bringing victims again to life.
Amini, who moved to the Netherlands as a baby and studied filmmaking on the London Film School, has beforehand distinguished himself with Kabul, City within the Wind, which opened IDFA in 2018, and received the particular jury prize and finest first movie at CPH: Dox in 2019.
The in-development jury comprised a trio of producers: Guatamala’s Elisa Fernanda Pirir (Stær), Lebanon’s Georges Schoucair (Abbout Productions) and France’s Louise Bellicaud (In Vivo Films).
The Work in Progress/Post-Production awards have been determined by filmmaker and cinematographer Martika Ramirez Escobar, who hails from the Philippines; Directors’ Fortnight Managing Director Christophe Leparc, who can also be head of Cinemed, and British Moroccan filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa.
They awarded the highest $40,000 post-production prize to Georgian director Levan Koguashvili’s drama Guria. After his award-winning 2021 Brooklyn-set drama Brighton 4th, this new characteristic sees the filmmaker return to Georgia for a portrait of a forsaken city within the west of the nation within the Nineteen Nineties, within the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the identical class, Chinese artist and filmmaker Qiu JiongJiong acquired a $15,000 jury particular point out for black comedy Fuxi, spanning 4 weird tales via the ages from the southwestern province of Sichuan.
In different awards, Lebanese director Estephan Khattar scooped the highest $10,000 SeriesLab Jury prize for Saria Othman Needs No Man a few 46-year-old lady who secretly enrols in an performing college, the place most the scholars are greater than half her age, to pursue her long-held dream of turning into an actress.
Two $5,000 SeriesLab Awards additionally went to Indian crime drama Cold Case One by Nithin Lukose and Hari Kirishnan and Generation-A, a supernatural Kenyan coming of age present by Mona Ombogo.
The SeriesLab jury was made up of producer Diego Ramírez Schrempp (Narcos, One Hundred Years Of Solitude), Channel Zero Studios head Jennifer Chen and Lebanese screenwriter and creativity coach Nadia Tabbara.
A quartet of tasks taking part within the Red Sea Lodge, a residency program in partnership with the TorinoFilmLab and sponsored by Film AlUla, additionally received awards, determined by the in-development jury
They have been Mahamed Al’Omda’s Blue Card ($70,000), Lydia Matata’s Pepo Kali ($50,000), Jawahine Zentar’s The Silent Ones and ($40,000) and Rulan Hasan’s Close Rose Close.
There was additionally one other dozen money and in-kind prizes handed out by a raft of sponsors together with the Arab Cinema Center, Filmmore, Freshly Ground Stories, Ithra, Ambient Light, Rotana Studios and Titrafilm.
The Red Sea Film Festival runs from December 5 to 14.
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