Casa Árabe is screening this evening, starting at 7:30 pm, the short fiction film The Waiting Room, directed in 2016 by Hend Fakhroo, and Haifa Street, from 2018, directed by Mohanad Hayal. The screenings are in the original version with English subtitles.
The short film is a moving story of two young women from diverse cultural backgrounds who share the fact that they each have a father in intensive care. Haifa Street is set in Baghdad in 2006. Haifa Street is one of the most dangerous places in the city, where the civil war and the violence are felt most acutely. When Ahmed arrives in a taxi on his way to his beloved Suad’s house to ask for her hand in marriage, he is shot by Salam, a sniper who is living his own personal hell on the roof of a building. Suad desperately tries to save Ahmed, but Salam prevents anyone from approaching him under threat of shooting. When his daughter Nadia asks her astute neighbour Dalal for help, all hell breaks loose under the ominous presence of the US occupation. The film is a close-up of characters on the edge, in moments of extreme complexity.
