Two Palestinian features that played at the Toronto International Film Festival will have their Middle East and North Africa premieres in the international competition at the Doha Film Festival, which runs from November 19 to 27. They are Muayad Alayan’s Conversation with the Sea and Hosam Abu Dan’s Thirteen in Gaza.
Conversation with the Sea, a family drama set in Jerusalem, had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival before its North American premiere in Toronto. It follows Kamal, a 60-year-old Palestinian man ordered by an Israeli court to pay a large social security debt that his son, Wael, is said to owe. Kamal believed Wael drowned in the Red Sea decades earlier, but with no official record of the death, he chases the only lead left to him.
The lead role is played by Kamel El-Basha, who won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the 2017 Venice festival for The Insult, directed by Lebanon’s Ziad Doueiri. The film is a co-production between Palestine, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with backing from the Red Sea Fund and the Doha Film Institute. The Doha screening will be its first in the Middle East and North Africa, after stops at two of the world’s largest festivals.
Thirteen in Gaza is Abu Dan’s first fiction feature. It premiered in the Centerpiece programme at the 51st Toronto festival, where it won the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema Award. Arab News described it as the first fiction feature shot in Gaza in 12 years. It was filmed entirely in the Gaza Strip with a local cast and crew during the war. Set in 2025, it follows 13-year-old Raghad, whose home is destroyed in a bombing that kills members of her family. Living in a crowded displacement camp without her mother, she reaches puberty with no privacy or access to basic sanitary care, while her father is pulled into a black market run by a powerful trader.
The film was produced by New Scene for Media Production with support from the Doha Film Institute and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, and Watermelon Pictures is handling distribution in North America. Both titles will now compete in Doha’s international competition after their runs in Venice and Toronto, giving Gulf audiences their first chance to see both films on a big screen.
