Maysoon Pachachi

Roguish comedy drama following the misadventures of small-time crook Arthur Daley.

In a typically mixed Baghdadi neighbourhood in 2006, a community of ordinary people try to live their everyday lives amidst the threat of unpredictable violence. At the heart of these intersecting stories we find Sara, a single mother and novelist, who regains her will to write after witnessing the forced exile of her Christian neighbour and best friend Sabiha. With the news of Saddam Hussein's sudden execution shortly before the New Year, Sara and her neighbours brace themselves for an uncertain future. Yet, like a miracle, each is able to sustain a fragile sense of hope.

The story centers on the life of a bordello in a midwestern prairie town in the 1870s. The whorehouse is run by pragmatic madam Annie Ryan and the film follows the life of several of her girls.

Iranian Journey is a documentary road movie with Massoumeh Soltan Baloghie, the first woman long-distance bus driver in Iran and, probably, the whole Islamic world. On a 22-hour bus trip north to south across Iran from Tehran to Bandar Abbas, Massoumeh talks about her life and aspirations. Her passengers chat, eat, sleep and tell their stories, and we meet people in the road stop cafés, on the sides of the road and in the cities en route.

The film documents a remarkable photography project; a group of women, from five cities in Iraq, live and work together in a traditional courtyard house in the Old City of the Syrian capital, Damascus. There they learn to take photographs, and at the same time, present their ‘life maps’ to each other; large charts full of family photos, scrawled poetry and quotations, the names of emotions and crisscrossing green, red and black marker lines, detailing all the ups and downs, forwards and reverses of their lives. With grief, humour, defiance, the women are able to unearth memories and tell stories, which have remained buried for 30 years in the course of just trying to survive devastating years of war, dictatorship and sanctions. In the end, they have woven together the threads of their individual lives into a collective fabric. And because this is a creative project, the experience is transformative; the act of remembering and listening is dynamic and productive.

Cairo is one of the few medieval cities in the world that remains relatively intact. LIVING WITH THE PAST is a filmic portrait of Darb al-Ahmar, a neighborhood in the heart of the old city now facing a process of radical change.