Lebanese Canadian director Katia Jarjoura’s drama Robbing Beirut has gained the highest $75,000 in-development prize within the Purple Sea Souk challenge market, presenting 31 function movies and 7 sequence initiatives inside Saudi Arabia’s Purple Sea Worldwide Movie Competition.
Set in opposition to the backdrop of Lebanon’s financial disaster, the film revolves round a lady who decides to rob a financial institution after it refuses handy over her $30,00 financial savings deposit, which she must pay for medical remedy for her sister.
The movie marks Jarjoura’s first fiction function after various documentaries together with Goodbye Murbarak, The Highway to Kerbala and most lately, Escape, about Syrian artists dwelling in exile.
Runners-up for the in-development prizes had been Indonesian director Makbul Mubarak’s Watch It Burn, which clinched a $20,000 award, and Afghan director Aboozar Amini’s Tahmina, which gained the $20,000 third prize.
Mubarak beforehand made waves with debut movie Autobiography, which premiered in Venice’s Horizons sidebar in 2022, profitable the Fipresci jury prize. His new challenge follows a Indonesian household struggling to maintain their clove farm afloat as a nickel mining increase of their distant space threatens to destroy their village’s outdated lifestyle.
Set in opposition to the backdrop of a wave of suicide assaults on public buildings in Kabul, Tahmina revolves round a lady, who’s secretly a Persian goddess from the Hindu Kush Mountains and has a particular energy for finding physique components and bringing victims again to life.
Amini, who moved to the Netherlands as a baby and studied filmmaking on the London Movie College, has beforehand distinguished himself with Kabul, Metropolis within the Wind, which opened IDFA in 2018, and gained the particular jury prize and greatest first movie at CPH: Dox in 2019.
The in-development jury comprised a trio of producers: Guatamala’s Elisa Fernanda Pirir (Stær), Lebanon’s Georges Schoucair (Abbout Productions) and France’s Louise Bellicaud (In Vivo Movies).
The Work in Progress/Submit-Manufacturing awards had been determined by filmmaker and cinematographer Martika Ramirez Escobar, who hails from the Philippines; Administrators’ Fortnight Managing Director Christophe Leparc, who can be head of Cinemed, and British Moroccan filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa.
They awarded the highest $40,000 post-production prize to Georgian director Levan Koguashvili’s drama Guria. After his award-winning 2021 Brooklyn-set drama Brighton 4th, this new function sees the filmmaker return to Georgia for a portrait of a forsaken city within the west of the nation within the Nineties, within the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the identical class, Chinese language artist and filmmaker Qiu JiongJiong acquired a $15,000 jury particular point out for black comedy Fuxi, spanning 4 weird tales by the ages from the southwestern province of Sichuan.
In different awards, Lebanese director Estephan Khattar scooped the highest $10,000 SeriesLab Jury prize for Saria Othman Wants No Man a few 46-year-old girl who secretly enrols in an performing college, the place most the scholars are greater than half her age, to pursue her long-held dream of changing into an actress.
Two $5,000 SeriesLab Awards additionally went to Indian crime drama Chilly Case One by Nithin Lukose and Hari Kirishnan and Technology-A, a supernatural Kenyan coming of age present by Mona Ombogo.
The SeriesLab jury was made up of producer Diego Ramírez Schrempp (Narcos, One Hundred Years Of Solitude), Channel Zero Studios head Jennifer Chen and Lebanese screenwriter and creativity coach Nadia Tabbara.
A quartet of initiatives collaborating within the Purple Sea Lodge, a residency program in partnership with the TorinoFilmLab and sponsored by Movie AlUla, additionally gained awards, determined by the in-development jury
They had been Mahamed Al’Omda’s Blue Card ($70,000), Lydia Matata’s Pepo Kali ($50,000), Jawahine Zentar’s The Silent Ones and ($40,000) and Rulan Hasan’s Shut Rose Shut.
There was additionally one other dozen money and in-kind prizes handed out by a raft of sponsors together with the Arab Cinema Middle, Filmmore, Freshly Floor Tales, Ithra, Ambient Gentle, Rotana Studios and Titrafilm.
The Purple Sea Movie Competition runs from December 5 to 14.
