In-Conversation with Eiza González
SHOWTIME
Other movies
AÏCHA
Director: Mehdi M. Barsaoui
Aya is the sole survivor of a bus crash on a mountain road. When she realises that nobody knows she is alive, she makes a snap decision to escape her dead-end village existence and become someone else. In thriving, liberal Tunis, she calls herself Amira, a thrilling change until one of those men is murdered and the investigating police start to question “Amira”’s sketchy life story. Fatma Sfar is vivid and immediately sympathetic as Aya/Amira, while narrative twists and nested details gradually reveal that she isn’t the only trickster with something to hide. Aicha was judged Best Mediterranean Film from the Academy of Fine Arts at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
SNOW WHITE
Director: Taghrid Abouelhassan
Both Iman and her younger sister dream of finding true love, within the strict parameters of life. For Iman, there is an obvious obstacle: she is a Little Person, only 119 centimeters tall, which puts her out of the running for an arranged marriage. Instead she goes online, hiding her size and compensating with her big laugh and big personality. Her sister has an offer of marriage, but Khaled’s family has second thoughts when they meet Iman. To put things off, the man’s mother insists on a top-of-the-range refrigerator as a dowry. A light-hearted but fascinating mix of issues around marriage, disability and sisterhood, with a magnetic star performance by Mariam Sherif at its very big heart.
YALLA PARKOUR
Director: Areeb Zuaiter
One of Zuaiter’s strongest memories of her mother is her radiant smile as a young woman on the beach in Gaza on one of the family’s regular holidays to Palestine. Her cousins would mock Areeb’s “outsider” accent, but according to her mother, this was where she belonged. From her current home in the US, Zuaiter combs the web for images that evoke something of her mother and finds teenager Ahmed Matar and his friends, a parkour team who use the ruins of Gaza’s bombed buildings as obstacle courses, laughing for joy against a background of explosions. She tracks Ahmed down online and the two become friends; meanwhile, he is determined that parkour will be his route out of the prison their shared homeland has become.