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There’s a passage at the end of the Janazah prayer, the Islamic funeral rite, which calls upon Allah to forgive “our young and elderly, our males and females.” It’s a prayer of tremendous importance to a quarter of the world’s population, and yet, inevitably, not everybody – or every body – fits into those gender categories.

Although Islamic law recognises, alongside males and females, intersex/Vsc people (khunsa) and feminine men or trans women (mukhannath), knowledge of the latter two is not widespread outside the scholarly world, and various forms of social prejudice complicate the situation as they do for people with other belief systems. Ahmad Alyaseer’s Oscar-qualifying short film focuses on an older Jordanian couple who seem to be dealing with the complexity of gender for the first time, and in the most difficult of circumstances. They are preparing the funeral rite for their child, whose body has been returned to.

Our Males And Females

When I met director Ahmad Alyaseer and his co-writer Rana Alyaseer at a press conference to discuss their Oscar-qualifying short, Our Males And Females, it had just won its hundredth award. Screened at over 120 different festivals around the world, it has been banned in several countries but has nevertheless acquired quite a following, especially within the Muslim populations whose traditions it addresses. Now it’s a real contender for the biggest award of all.

The film focuses on a Jordanian father (Kamel El Basha) and mother (Shafeqa Al-Tal) who preparing for the funeral of their child, whose body has been returned to them from overseas. The difficulty is that the body must first be washed, and whilst this is traditionally a strictly gendered ritual, it’s clear that the person they had thought of as their son cannot now be fitted into either a male or female category.

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn and Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction took home the top prizes in the inaugural Audience Awards at the 2023 Scad Savannah Film Festival.

The Savannah College of Art and Design (Scad) announced Tuesday the audience winners, which were selected by festival attendees, alongside the juried winners of the festival’s 26th annual iteration.

Oscar-winning Fennell’s Saltburn was the top pick, with the filmmaker appearing in-person to receive the Spotlight Director Award in front of a sold-out screening. American Fiction, the directorial debut of writer and producer Cord Jefferson, was the year’s runner-up and also appeared during the nearly two-week-long event, where he was honored with the Breakthrough Director Award.

A total of 19 awards were announced last Thursday from the 99 films chosen to compete as part of the 2023 festival. There were over 2,100 submissions across competition categories, including Narrative Features, Documentary Features, Professional Shorts, Animated Shorts, Documentary Shorts,...

In the Blind Spot, Ayşe Polat’s documentary-style conspiracy thriller set in modern-day Turkey has won the German Independence Award for best film at the 30th Oldenburg International Film Festival.

The drama, which premiered in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival this year, follows a German film team shooting a documentary in a remote Kurdish village who begin to witness mysterious happenings and become entwined in a sinister conspiracy.

Oldenburg’s best actor honors went to Jon Jacobs for playing Cassian Elwes in the biographical drama Passenger C, Elwes’ directorial debut. Alexandrea Meyer won best actress for Truman Kewley’s horror thriller Beautiful Friend, in which she plays the object of obsession for a violent incel, played by Adam Jones.

Jon Jacobs in ‘Passenger C’ Alexandrea Meyer in ‘Beautiful Friend’

Oldenburg’s audacity award, given to a film that pushes the boundaries of modern cinema, went to Jérôme Vandewattyne’s The Belgian Wave,...