Lebanese Canadian director Katia Jarjoura’s drama Robbing Beirut has won the top $75,000 in-development prize in the Red Sea Souk project market, presenting 31 feature films and seven series projects within Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea International Film Festival.
Set against the backdrop of Lebanon’s economic crisis, the movie revolves around a woman who decides to rob a bank after it refuses to hand over her $30,00 savings deposit, which she needs to pay for medical treatment for her sister.
The film marks Jarjoura’s first fiction feature after a number of documentaries including Goodbye Murbarak, The Road to Kerbala and most recently, Escape, about Syrian artists living in exile.
Runners-up for the in-development prizes were Indonesian director Makbul Mubarak’s Watch It Burn, which clinched a $20,000 award, and Afghan director Aboozar Amini’s Tahmina, which won the $20,000 third prize.
Mubarak previously made waves with debut film Autobiography, which premiered in Venice’s Horizons sidebar in 2022, winning the Fipresci jury prize. His new project follows a Indonesian family struggling to keep their clove farm afloat as a nickel mining boom in their remote area threatens to destroy their village’s old way of life.
Set against the backdrop of a wave of suicide attacks on public buildings in Kabul, Tahmina revolves around a woman, who is secretly a Persian goddess from the Hindu Kush Mountains and has a special power for locating body parts and bringing victims back to life.
Amini, who moved to the Netherlands as a child and studied filmmaking at the London Film School, has previously distinguished himself with Kabul, City in the Wind, which opened IDFA in 2018, and won the special jury prize and best first film at CPH: Dox in 2019.
The in-development jury comprised a trio of producers: Guatamala’s Elisa Fernanda Pirir (Stær), Lebanon’s Georges Schoucair (Abbout Productions) and France’s Louise Bellicaud (In Vivo Films).
The Work in Progress/Post-Production awards were decided by filmmaker and cinematographer Martika Ramirez Escobar, who hails from the Philippines; Directors’ Fortnight Managing Director Christophe Leparc, who is also head of Cinemed, and British Moroccan filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa.
They awarded the top $40,000 post-production prize to Georgian director Levan Koguashvili’s drama Guria. After his award-winning 2021 Brooklyn-set drama Brighton 4th, this new feature sees the filmmaker return to Georgia for a portrait of a forsaken town in the west of the country in the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the same category, Chinese artist and filmmaker Qiu JiongJiong received a $15,000 jury special mention for black comedy Fuxi, spanning four bizarre tales through the ages from the southwestern province of Sichuan.
In other awards, Lebanese director Estephan Khattar scooped the top $10,000 SeriesLab Jury prize for Saria Othman Needs No Man about a 46-year-old woman who secretly enrols in an acting school, where most the students are more than half her age, to pursue her long-held dream of becoming an actress.
Two $5,000 SeriesLab Awards also went to Indian crime drama Cold Case One by Nithin Lukose and Hari Kirishnan and Generation-A, a supernatural Kenyan coming of age show by Mona Ombogo.
The SeriesLab jury was made up of producer Diego Ramírez Schrempp (Narcos, One Hundred Years Of Solitude), Channel Zero Studios head Jennifer Chen and Lebanese screenwriter and creativity coach Nadia Tabbara.
A quartet of projects participating in the Red Sea Lodge, a residency program in partnership with the TorinoFilmLab and sponsored by Film AlUla, also won awards, decided by the in-development jury
They were Mahamed Al’Omda’s Blue Card ($70,000), Lydia Matata’s Pepo Kali ($50,000), Jawahine Zentar’s The Silent Ones and ($40,000) and Rulan Hasan’s Close Rose Close.
There was also another dozen cash and in-kind prizes handed out by a raft of sponsors including the Arab Cinema Center, Filmmore, Freshly Ground Stories, Ithra, Ambient Light, Rotana Studios and Titrafilm.
The Red Sea Film Festival runs from December 5 to 14.