Acting
While traveling to a resort in Tunisia, the magician and clairvoyant Professor Vestar befriends the idle millionaire Edouard Vangard and he offers a ride in his car. Vestar discloses to Edouard that he had had a premonition of a woman being murdered in a desert area.
A rich Moroccan who belongs to the better circles has seven daughters. Whatever happens, the eighth offspring must be a son. It is a girl again, but she is given a male name, Ahmed and grows up like a boy. When Ahmed is 21, he is in an identity crisis: he wants to shave, leave a mustache and take his niece to wife. In the meantime, Ahmed's father is dying and wants to sail to heaven. He calls to Ahmed and calls her a female name Zahra and gives her freedom so that she can go out.
A pioneering film from Tunisia, Fatma 75 is the first non-fiction film by a Tunisian woman, a feminist essay film, and the first in a series of powerful films about strong female figures in the country. The film was made in the UN International Women's Year 1975, and has long been recognised as one of the most important films from North Africa, but has never officially been seen before due to censorship.
The story of an old man who is losing his grip on reality, fighting to keep his memory in spite of the fast moving society in which he lives.
Lebanese director Randa Chahal Sabbag spins this bleak war drama about the brutal absurdity of the urban warfare of Beirut during the 1980s. Opening with the shocking image of kittens being blown apart, the film loosely follows the travails of Bernadette (Nada Ghosn), a naïve country girl sent to the city as a maid for a mansion long since abandoned by the owners. There she meets Therese (Renee Dick), a veteran house cleaner who takes her under her wing. One day, while accompanying her friend to the cemetery, she meets a rakish Arab militiaman, and the two fall in love.
The film forces us to confront a bipolar reality, once dark, once light, a reality too often repressed.
With no news of her companion Seif, a Palestinian fighter who disappeared in Beirut, Houria, a stewardess with an Arab airline, returns to Tunisia in search of Khélil, a war photographer who was the last to meet the missing man. But she finds herself trapped in an environment under siege, transported back several centuries to the era of Arab chivalric epics with their abducted heroines and vengeances of honor.
