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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.
U ARE THE UNIVERSE
Director: Pavlo Ostrikov
Far into the future, Earth is peppered with nuclear waste storage units overstuffed with radioactive garbage which, thanks to an increase in volcanic activity, is destroying the planet. Space trucker Andriy’s mission is to dump this waste on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons, from a rig with only a down-at-heel gym and a wise-cracking robot called Martin to keep him entertained. Then he sees the Earth explode behind him. Does this mean he is the last person left alive? Apparently not: the voice of a French woman reaches him from a distant space station. He just has to find a way to blast in her direction. Ostrikov contemplates the awful reality of loneliness, but provides plenty of laughs along the way.
SABA
Director: Maksud Hossain
Saba, 25, lives in Dhaka with her demanding mother Shirin, a paraplegic whose frustrations and rage often find a target in the daughter who cares for her. When Shirin’s worsening condition requires surgery it falls to Saba to find the money to pay for it. Securing a job at a seedy Shisha bar, Saba befriends the manager Ankur and, for the first time, pictures what a life of her own could look like. Maksud Hossain’s debut feature is a close-up look at a complicated bond between mother and daughter that lurches between love and guilt, co-dependence and the longing for autonomy - but it is also a social drama, detailing the hardships that underlay the riots in Bangladesh earlier this year.
In-Conversation with Eva Longoria
Director: Eva Longoria Baston
Having worked consistently in Hollywood for over 20 years, Eva Longoria has cemented herself as an industry staple known for her work both in front of and behind the camera. Longoria continues to hone her craft, seek new projects, and expand opportunities for others by paving the way for future women and minority producers, directors and industry leaders in Hollywood and beyond.