Over the Sand, Under the Sun

About Wedad Nasef. A woman stayed at Quneitra after Israeli occupation.

A young aspiring actress in Syria discovers she has been inhabited by the soul of a woman who died on the day she was born.

Thirty-year-old Imane lives with her husband and three children in a modest house across from the historic citadel of Aleppo. She suddenly realizes that it's been ten years that she's been married, ten years during which she's done basically nothing more than take care of her husband and their three children.

Suleiman, a 12-year old boy, lives overlooking Damascus with his poor family, along with many other displaced people from the Golan Heights. Suleiman decides with his mother and siblings to raise money by selling tissues to help his father, a gas cylinder seller. His dream? To buy a Suzuki pick-up truck of his own.

Trained as an electrician, Nazih Shahbandar became fascinated with the technology behind film production and was one of the pioneers of cinema production in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1947, he set up a studio fitted with film equipment that was almost entirely of his own fabrication. He wrote scripts, built sets, and innovated new methods of sound recording and transmission. As an enthusiastic inventor, he produced and directed the first Syrian film with sound. His dream was to film and screen a 3D film. An ode to cinema, this documentary is a portrait of Shahbandar.

Documentary about Palestinians living in a refugee camp.

In this documentary film, Malas explores the life and music of the classical Aleppan singer and composer Sabri Moudallal (1918-2006). "Maqam" is the melodic system of traditional Arabic music.

The film explores the Arab-Israeli conflict as seen through the experiences of an Arab family in newly-liberated city of Quneitra, headed by a resistance fighter.

Fateh Moudarres (1922-1999) was a crucial personage in Syrian artistic and cultural life, a pioneer of contemporary painting, a literate and prolific novelist. For about forty years has transformed his atelier, located in the center of Damascus, into a place of encounter and dialogue on art. The film is a journey of love to the artist's universe, to his works composed from memories of light, colors, and the shadows of a painful existence.

In the film that marks the emergence of auteur cinema in Syria, a young widow and her children are forced to move to Damascus, where the boys come of age against the backdrop of the military coups that punctuated the 1950s.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

Focusing on the work of cartoonists in Egypt, Algeria, Syria, and Palestine, this documentary examines how comic strips and caricatures are becoming a vehicle for dissent and a voice for freedom of expression in the Arab world.

Veteran Syrian director Hala Alabdalla returns to LFF with a moving portrait of her late friend and pioneer of Arab non-fiction cinema.

An affectionate portrait of writer and publisher Farouk Mardem-Bey.

Interviews with three Syrian women who live in exile.