JCC 2015 / Official Competition / Debut Film

In the largest slaughterhouse in Algiers, men live and work in closed to the throbbing rhythms of their tasks and their dreams. Hope, bitterness, love, paradise and hell, the football stories as of the Chaabi and Rai melodies that set their lives and their world.

Emily, Jabz, September, Nikki, Tanya, Matty, Tali and Rashi. Black and whites South Africans, male and female, gay and straight. Youth in the luxurious suburb of Johannesburg who are smashed all day long failing to have future plans.

A few months before the revolution in Tunisia, 18 year-old Farah has a passion for life and sings in a political rock band. Her mother, knowing the dangers of Tunisia, wants her to pursue a career as a doctor.

Set during the Algerian War of Independence. In the film, the French army surrounds a southern Algerian village where they believe an enemy is being hidden and force the inhabitants to either confront the issue or die of thirst.

A Palestinian car thief gets into the trouble of his life when he steals the wrong car. What he thought was an Israeli car and an easy way to make money in his impoverished refugee camp turns out to be a load of misfortune when he discovers a kidnapped Israeli soldier in the trunk.

Rana and Guy, a young married couple live in today's city of Beirut. A city forced into modernity and constantly transforming to a rhythm of an unstable environment. Rana suddenly quits her job and falls slowly into a state of lingering. Guy decides they need to leave their home and go on a road-trip that leads them to the mountains. The road becomes one of remembrance and nostalgia. A road that might bring them closer to themselves and ultimately to each other.

April 2013, Algiers, Algeria. Djamel an independent filmmaker asks Yasmine his ex-wife to write a script based on the Algerian political current affairs. Instead of that, the young woman starts writing a loopy story and mischievously settles a score with him.

A family of four generations in their house in the Lebanese mountains. A dog. What does it mean to live in war that constantly changes features and never ends? What does it mean to care for a family in such a situation? Which values do you teach your children? What is society in a civil war? Or the nation?

While Mehdi is torn between his secret gay affair and the perspective of getting married, his sister Hind struggles to face her present and to reveal the secrets of her past kept in the dark.

The close down of an old sugar mill in Mauritius, calls into question the lives of Marco and his friends, a group of former workmates in their mid fifties. In this country where sugar cane has always been the nourishing mother earth, the characters find themselves suddenly trapped between inescapable modernity and living conditions they find it all the harder to accept. The last sugar canes are cut down, revealing new ephemeral horizons and the deep ties that unite them all.

An ordinary family whose life takes a dramatic turn. Between despair, guilt and desire for life, how to reconstruct when you face the unacceptable ?

A meditation on grief, death and psychological entrapment that dispenses dialogue and narrative for a visual experience that breaks the conventions.

A Palestinian poet and an Italian journalist meet five Palestinians and Syrians in Milan who entered Europe via the Italian island of Lampedusa after fleeing the war in Syria. They decide to help them complete their journey to Sweden, and hopefully avoid getting themselves arrested as traffickers, by faking a wedding. With a Palestinian friend dressed up as the bride and a dozen or so Italian and Syrian friends as wedding guests, they cross halfway over Europe on a four-day journey of three thousand kilometres.

Explores the last 70 years of Palestinian politics in the life of Dr Elias Shoufani, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, academic writer and radical leftist intellectual.

Nine men gather for a workshop on a rooftop. There they perform confrontations of everyday life, with the police and at the workplace. In the process, the actors engage a space between the theatrical and the real. This is not a film about workers. The factory is a microcosm, a miniature Egypt.

Beirut 2013. My uncle Riad and his friends, all veterans of the Christian militias in Lebanon still live nostalgia for the war that impassioned their youth. Between shared memories in my uncle's hunting shop and their hunting trips from where they often return empty-handed, I question them, I confront them. What is really left from their old fights, their cause, and their ideals in times where Lebanon continues to drown in instability?

Marième is a Aji-bi, living in a small Senegalese community stranded in Casablanca. Hesitating between a regularization in Morocco or crossing to Europe, women of all ages manage to survive in a Moroccan society both generous and hostile.

A Man belongs to a remote rural villages (one of the Egyptian villages) decides to leave for the city - the capital (Cairo-Egypt), hoping to achieve his dream. 11 years have passed where anything not done much more than just wandering and at the same time is unable to return to the countryside, where belongs.

Three women - grandmother, mother and daughter - live hidden away in an old building in Damascus. They have chosen to live in voluntary imprisonment, cutting themselves off from a city in a constant state of siege. As war rages outside, the women wander through the rooms like ghosts who are still alive, with passionate Syrian soap operas as the surreal soundtrack. The first film by a young documentary maker, a symbolic, almost abstract, complex and fierce reflection on the tragic destiny of a country.

The invisible routine of the inhabitants of Marrakech inner city, the never-ending ballet of the system's wretches. Everyday they are dozens coming to the Medina's walls, hoping someone will give them some work. They are the invisible workers making the rise of this touristic city possible.