ARABIC

Tarik, a cross-dressing troubadour who performs traditional dances and shunned by those around him. Crippled by inertia, he is unable to feel emotion even when faced with the man who killed his family. Larbi, the family horse who pulls the cart on which Tarik dances, won't take another step. And word has it the drinking water has been contaminated. And Tarik's false persecution as a homosexual where homosexuality is still palimpsest and a criminal offense.

Ghalia is inhabited by the soul of Zeina, a girl who drowned the day she was born. Haunted by Zeina's past life, Ghalia travels to Damascus to study acting and understand her present condition. She meets Fouad an aspiring filmmaker who becomes fascinated by Ghalia's duality. He takes her under his wing and helps her find a place to live in a Damascene house, now converted into a dorm inhabited by young Syrians from different regions. Within the confines of the house and its ancient courtyard, Fouad's love for Ghalia and Zeina blossoms while the tumultuous events in Syria start unfolding in the streets around them gradually encroaches on their idyllic isolation.

There are things we have no daily relationship with,but that we cannot live without. they remain stuck between the past and present,between sky and earth.

Written by author and poet Ahmed Salmeen and directed by award-winning Emirati Waleed Al Shehhi, Dolphins revolves around Fadel, an ambulance driver, who is divorced and has one son, Saud, who lives with his mother Kawthar. Saud lives in a state of uncertainty due to the separation of his parents, which leads him and his friend Hilal on an unusual adventure with an extraordinary outcome.

When the bomb comes the first thing we do is to run away, later we remember and think of everything we left behind. We did not bid farewell to our homes, memories, photos, identities and life that passed. It is about how homes haunt the life of the souls that were living in them, as much as they themselves haunt the houses.

A group of kids is playing with toy weapons in a bomb-shattered Baghdad, this way reproducing the terrible reality around them; everyone seems to enjoy the game, everyone except for Hassan. The small Hassan doesn't play with weapons, he prefers his toy cars to the guns and rifles with which the others shoot, chase and pretend to kill each other. Wondering through the city, Hassan reaches a strange place, it looks like a dumpster but it's actually the place in which the cars and the other vehicles that have been destroyed by terrorist attacks are taken to and abandoned. Hassan makes his toy cars run on the vehicles' remains, until he finds a bus, destroyed by a bomb, and gets inside of it: it's a school bus. Among backpacks and schoolbooks, Hassan seems lost in his fantasies, apparently captured by the memories left by his peers. In the meantime, three of the kids that were playing war reach the car cemetery too, continuing to shoot and chasing one another yelling. Hassan hides and sees one of them finding a gun inside a car, a real one this time, not a plastic one. With the gun in his hand, the kid confronts his friends and is about to shoot, for real, but a bomb-alarm goes off just in time to stop the irreparable, reuniting the kids under the common fear. Terrorized, the three kids leave their toy weapons and approach Hassan and his innocent toy cars. They will find themselves happily flying a kite found in the ruins, a much more pacific vision then the one of young people playing war while around them a real war it's actually destroys their lives every day. However, as we get away from the car cemetery, we see a sign warning for the presence of uranium in the dumpster. The war continues to destroy, both deafening as an explosion and silent and lethal as poison.

A young Emirati man commits a crime that leads to his lifetime imprisonment and is burdened by the shame that he has brought to his family and his loved ones.

When Nadima the violinist dies, her husband organizes a traditional Iraqi condolence service. A little girl discovers that the ceremony covers up another activity and bears no similarity to other services previously attended by the girl.