MACHTAT Sonia Ben Slama | 2023 | 82′
MANITY Hussen Ibrahim | 2023 | 15′
SAFAR presents a double bill of screenings examining gender, expectation and tradition, including the UK premiere of Machtat by Sonia Ben Slama.
Fatma and her two daughters, Najeh and Waffeh, are machtat, wedding musicians in Mahdia, a small city in Tunisia. The sisters follow opposite paths: while Najeh, divorced, tries to remarry to escape the authority of her brothers, Waffeh wishes to divorce her violent husband. And Fatma navigates between the two, praying that things will go better one day.
Filmed over several years with the musicians, Machtat captures the contours of these women’s existence and their contradictions: torn between their duties as women and their desires as musicians, between the freedom of summer and the monotony of winter, and between their financial independence and the authority of men surrounding them.
The film will be preceded by Hussein Ibrahim’s short film Manity (2023), where on a sunny day, Firas — an 11-year-old boy — accompanies his father Tayseer and his father’s friend Rayan on a bird-hunting jaunt in the Lebanese mountainside. What is supposed to be a calm hunting trip turns into an unforgettable experience.
Manity
DIRECTOR: Hussen Ibraheem
COUNTRY: Lebanon, France
LANGUAGE: Arabic
Machtat