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Shorts 1: The Ball of Wool/ Make a Wish/ Crash/ Lipstick
Sat, Nov 10, 2:00 P.M. Q&A with director Cherien Dabis
Synopsis
The Ball of Wool (La Pelote de laine), by Fatma-Zohra Zamoum. France, 2005, 14 min, 35mm, NY Premiere
In a working-class housing project, a young immigrant mother is kept locked in her apartment because her husband fears she might get “lost” in the unfamiliar city. She strikes up a friendship with her neighbor, and they exchange small gifts and photographs from balcony to balcony. A tribute to the life-affirming ingenuity and wit of women trapped in adversity.
Make a Wish (Itmanna) by Cherien Dabis. Palestine/US, 2006, 12 min, 35mm, NY Premiere
Mariam, an 11-year-old Palestinian girl, is determined to buy the perfect birthday cake. As she embarks on a series of negotiations to find the money she needs, political turbulence winds alongside her in the form of news broadcasts and random gunshots. A trip to the bakery depicts not only the subtle tensions of a politically charged environment, but also the grief that can result from growing up under occupation.
Crash (Carpısma), by Umut Aral. Turkey, 2005, 17 min, 35mm
Is it a coincidence that three criminals crash into each other, or is it fate? A hired gun, a con man and a thief cross paths at Central Station and start to work as a team. But their past won’t let them go too far away...
Lipstick (Matik), by Payman Maadi. Iran, 2007, 30 min, BetaSP, World Premiere
When a well-to-do Tehran resident discovers an illicit lipstick smudge on his neck, he sets off an unexpected chain of events in this 21 Grams–esque short that reveals some of the complexities of Iranian society.
Filmmaker's Biography
Born in 1967 in Bordj-Ménaïel, Algeria, Fatma-Zohra Zamoum arrived in Paris in 1988. Since then, she has pursued painting, fiction and cinema. She writes and finances her own short films and currently teaches art history in university.
Born to Palestinian immigrant parents, Cherien Dabis is an award-winning independent filmmaker and graduate of Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in film. Her short films have screened at some of the world’s top film festivals. Dabis received several generous grants in support of Make a Wish, including the National Geographic Society’s All Roads Film Project Seed Grant, the Jerome Foundation’s New York City Media Arts Grant and a New York State Council on the Arts Electronic Media and Film Distribution Grant. For Amreeka, her debut feature film slated to go into production in early 2008, Dabis was awarded an Artist Fellowship in Screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as the L’Oréal Paris Woman of Worth Vision Award, presented at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
Umut Aral was born in 1976, in Istanbul. After studying management at Bosphorus University, he received an M.F.A. in cinema and television from Marmara University. During his university years he joined Bosphorus University Actors and played leading roles, worked as director and playwright in more than six plays, and also put on two plays and a musical in Galatasaray High School. After finishing university he started work in the film industry as an assistant director and production manager. Since 2002 he has worked as a commercial film director for Atlantik Film. Crash is his second short film. The first, thirtyfour, was nominated for many national awards and selected for international film festivals in 2000.
Payman Mohamed Maadi was born in New York in 1970. He is the screenwriter for a number of successful Iranian box-office hits, including Swan’s Song (2001), Coma (2003), Wedding Supper (2004) and Star Café (2005). He directed a short film, Hand of God (2006), before making his current film, Lipstick.
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