Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam

The Filmfestival that takes you to the Arab world and surprise you with impressive stories. Arab Camera Festival is a 4 day journey through the Arab world. Get to know the rich history, the politics, the beauty and the artistry of this extraordinary part of the world.

Featured festival films 2016:

• Barakah Meets Barakah – In a time when traditions walk side by side with smartphones and social medias, Barakah, a funny and improbable municipal agent responsible to enforce order in town, will meet a beautiful erratic ultra-famous Instagram video blogger. The unthinkable happens: they fall in love and will try to have a proper date against all odds. This romantic comedy explores the boundaries of dating in a one of the most conservative countries of the Arab world: Saudi Arabia.

• Screening for children – a film screening for the upper grades of elementary schools. The children will be prepared in class for the Arab Festival screening by doing exercises that focus on the film’s theme. Fun and informative in the same time!

• Inhebbek Hedi – Young Tunisian Hedi lives an ordered life in which he believes there can be no more surprises. His future will play out as other people have planned. Take his mother for example, who always holds a protecting hand over him and has contributed to the fact that he has never been able to develop a mind of his own. Or his boss, who makes him dance to his tune and at whose behest Hedi has to undertake a business trip to Mahdia – of all times, in the week before his own wedding. But then something happens that nobody would ever have expected: at his hotel in Mahdia Hedi meets a young woman named Rim and falls in love with her. But will Hedi also have the courage to escape his inner and outer prisons?

• Starve Your Dog – A painful chapter in Morocco’s history is revealed through an interview with a notorious political strongman, about his role in the brutal former regime. Ambiguity still surrounds the country’s present and future. The chaotic, freewheeling second chapter in Hicham Lasri’s irreverent and prodigious dog-themed trilogy (after They Are the Dogs), Starve Your Dog shines a bright light onto the shadows of Morocco’s recent past.

• Nawara – Between the alleys of the poor neighborhood and the roads leading to the villas of the luxury compound, Nawara goes back and forth everyday on her way to work, carrying in her journey between these two worlds the worries of the people of her neighborhood and their simple dreams, Nawara didn’t know that the spring of 2011 will bring her what she never expected. Nawara is an Egyptian film set in the early days of the Arab Spring, a time of big dreams when a bright future seemed very close.

• In the Last Days of the City – Downtown Cairo is an organism that still seems alive back in winter 2009/10, but is becoming increasingly alien even to those born there. Khalid is looking for a flat. He’s a filmmaker. He looks at his images over and over again, as if he were waiting from them to produce some sort of meaning. For his friends, Cairo is a fixed reference point. One left Baghdad and is now living as a refugee in Berlin, another stayed there, a third lives in troubled Beirut. When they decide to send Khalid video material from their cities, it’s not so much about helping him with his film as preserving something they still associate with Cairo, fully aware that it’s already a fantasy.