Syria

Dahna Abourahme is a Palestinian filmmaker who grew up in Abu Dhabi and Amman. She received her MA in Media Studies at the New School for Social Research in New York where she worked as a filmmaker and youth media educator. She is currently living in Beirut teaching at the Lebanese American University and involved in community media. In 2004, she completed her first feature documentary, until when…, a personal portrait of four Palestinian families living in Dheisheh refugee camp in the West Bank. Her current documentary, The Kingdom of Women, grew out of an oral history project initiated by the Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts (Al-Jana) with the women of Ein El Hilweh Camp in south Lebanon.

Right In the heart of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa is a small orphanage called “Little Heaven”. One of the orphans, Lydia, is 13 today. A truly joyful event, because she can now move to the ‘other house‘ where all of the ‘big kids’ live. Unfortunately this special day is overshadowed by the shocking news delivered to her by the head nurse: Lydia is HIV positive.

Salem is an Iraqi fashion designer in Damascus. Botrus lives a remote existence in a hillside monastery. This consistently insightful and unexpected documentary offers a unique perspective on what the dream of freedom means to two very different people in the face of a brutal regime. The result is a vital snapshot of life in the year before Syria’s uprising.