88 minutes, 2023
Directors : Heba KHALED (Syria), Talal DERKI (Syria) and Ali WAJEEH (Syria)
Production : Real Lava (Danemark), Jouzour Film (Germany)
A welded group of young Syrian women embark on a radical project: to produce a play that exposes the culture of misogyny and sexual abuse that has plagued the lives of women in their country for generations. Farah, Eliana, Inana, Souhir and Grace want to denounce the oppression of women, knowing that their production will make it more difficult for them to find work. Working with exiled Syrian filmmakers Heba Khaled (who is beginning his filmaking carrer) and Talal Derki (Oscar nominee in the film Of Fathers And Sons), as well as Ali Wajeeh in Damascus, the women scatter across the city exhausted by war to collect individual stories that will form the basis of their play. But the questions explored in the play and the film are closer than they appear…
Heba KHALED worked for CNN and Reuters in Damascus and Beirut between 2011 and 2013 as a screenwriter and executive producer on these and other Arab media channels. In 2014 she started directing her first short film, People of the Wasteland. The same year, she moved to Berlin where she assisted filmmaker Talal Derki in the making of his film Of Fathers and Sons, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary Film category in 2020.
Talal DERKI was born in Damascus in 1977 and has lived in Berlin since 2013. He studied filmmaking in Athens. His short and feature documentaries have received numerous awards at various festivals.
His two films Return to Homs and Of Fathers and Sons won the Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014 and 2018. He was nominated for the Oscars and won the German Film Awards (Lola) in 2019 for Of Fathers and Sons. He became a member of the Academy the same year.