Doha Film Institute
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After an automobile accident, a young Palestinian wakes up with total amnesia – and finds he can speak only Hebrew.
Ahmad is a 22-year-old Palestinian from a conservative Muslim family in Hebron. With his friend Issa, he dresses like an Israeli settler and steals petrol from a nearby settlement to run the only ambulance in their camp. Secretly, he is learning Hebrew in case he needs it for the gasoline raids. Then he is hit by a car and falls into a coma. When he wakes, he finds he can only speak Hebrew. His father thinks that he has been possessed by an Israeli djinn; his girlfriend doubts his patriotism and goes off with a young man in the resistance; and his community treats him like an Israeli settler. Ahmad embarks on a journey to regain the identity he lost when he stopped communicating in Arabic.

Credits

Director
Yahya Alabdallah
Screenwriter
Yahya Alabdallah
Producer
Rula Nasser
Production Company
Imaginarium Films
Cast
Bissan: Mais Abdul Hadi
Ahmad: Mahmoud Shalaby
Imad: Ashraf Barhouma

PIF DS 18 Oct.

About the Director

Yahya Alabdallah
Independent filmmaker Yahya Alabdallah was born in Libya in 1978, raised in Saudi Arabia, and lives in Jordan. A writer, director, producer and literary critic, he holds two Master's degrees, in Literature and Cinema from the ECIAR film school in Paris. He has participated in programmes including the Berlinale's Talent Campus, Produire au Sud, the Festival des 3 Continents and the Producers' Netwo

Producers

Rula Nasser

Rula Nasser is an independent Jordanian producer with an accumulated experience in diverse aspects of production for Commercials, TV series, and low-budget films, all the way to big-budget studio films. She started with the BBC Channel and Discovery Channel projects in the Middle East, a journey that contained self-exploration of local stories and talents across Jordan. Nasser joined the Royal Film Commission in 2005 to develop the Filmmaker’s Support Program. In 2011, she established Imaginarium Films, a company that focuses on discovering local talents and developing an appealing international story embedded in the Arab world.

Contacts