REIMAGINED VOLUME 1: NYSSA
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.
MARIA
Director: Pablo Larraín
Maria Callas, the greatest opera singer the world has seen, died aged only 53 in her sumptuous Parisian apartment, discovered by the devoted servants who had spent their days hiding her pills and trying to persuade her to eat. She had not sung in public for years. Larrain’s swirling work of fantasy shows La Callas remembering - or hallucinating - performances from her past, her long affair with Aristotle Onassis and her loveless childhood in wartime Athens, where she sang for German soldiers. Wandering Paris in her last days, Maria is trailed by an imaginary journalist to whom she tries to explain the pain and effort of creation. Angelina Jolie conveys Callas’s grandeur and her inner tumult in a landmark performance.
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.