LISBON'S ARAB FILM FESTIVAL

The Arab Film Festival took place in Lisbon from October 1st to 5th, showing ten films from the Middle East and North Africa with the aim of promoting cultural dialog between the regions and highlighting Portugal's proximity to the region.

The festival opened with Everybody Loves Touda, a Moroccan production about a woman who wants to move to Casablanca so that she can live out her dream of being a singer and provide a better life for her son.

This was followed by Six Pieds Sur Terre, the story of an Algerian student in France who, forced to regularize his migratory situation, sees no other solution than to work for an Islamic funeral home where he discovers the mortuary rites associated with cleaning the body.

Also screened from Algeria was Abou Leila, the search by two policemen for the eponymous terrorist but which is actually an attempt to get away from the urban conflicts in Algiers due to the ongoing civil war.

The Saudi black comedy Mandoob tells of the misadventures of Fahad, a 30-year-old man with no great prospects in life who is forced to sell alcohol to pay for his father's medical treatment and help support his divorced sister.

In Les Meutes, a father recently released from prison and a son who wants to avoid that lifestyle are forced to hunt down a dogfighting organizer in exchange for money. The task is complicated by the death of the victim and father and son are forced into a difficult collaboration to get rid of the corpse, in an odyssey of mystical and esoteric contours.

From Tunisia comes À peine j'ouvre les yeus, the life of young Farah and her rock band, who didn't shy away from including political messages in their music at a time before the Jasmin Revolution.

There was room for documentaries such as Bye Bye Tiberias, the return of actress Hiam Abbass to her home village with her daughter for an intergenerational dialog between mother, daughter and grandmother about the life choices made, the weight of family and the impact of the Nakba, the Palestinian exodus of 1948.

Costa Brava, Lebanon focuses on a family fleeing Beirut for the mountains to escape the pollution of the capital. However, the idyllic life allowed by nature is put in check by the installation of a landfill next to their home.

A wedding in Nazareth is the motto for Wajib, where father and son, estranged by life's circumstances, are forced to work together to hand-deliver all the invitations to their daughter's wedding, according to an ancient Palestinian custom.

The festival ended with the screening of Inshallah Walad, in which Nawal, a widow, has to pretend to be pregnant to ensure that both she and her daughter can escape Jordan's draconian paternal inheritance laws, which would leave them deprived of all their property simply because Nawal didn't have a male heir.