Cinemed and Aflamuna pick seven Arab projects for October incubator
Seven unfinished films from the Arab world have earned a pitch slot in southern France next month.
The Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival, also known as Cinemed, and Beirut-based Arab cinema platform Aflamuna have unveiled the seven projects for the fifth Aflamuna x Cinemed Encounters, their joint project incubator, as reported by Deadline. The programme supports Arab filmmakers from across the Middle East and Africa. It sits inside the festival's industry days.
Cinemed runs from October 16 to 24. Its professional days run from October 20 to 22 this year.
The incubator started in 2021 with backing from France's National Cinema Center (CNC). It was set up to support filmmakers working in 22 Arab territories in the Middle East and Africa. In simple terms, it is a marketplace. Directors and producers bring films that are still being written or edited and meet distributors, funders and festival programmers who can help get them finished.
One documentary in the line-up is Disappeared. It follows five Syrian women living with the forced disappearance of their sons and husbands under the Bashar Al-Assad regime. It is directed by Anas Zawahri, a Palestinian director raised in Syria. His earlier film My Memory Is Full of Ghosts revisited the city of Homs in 2023, before Al-Assad was overthrown in December 2024.
Fiction is in the mix too. The Hearse to the Final House of Happiness centres on a mental patient granted brief leave from his institution to attend a family wedding. It is the debut feature from Palestinian director Wisam Al Jafari. Hanna Attallah is producing under his Route 243 banner.
Two further titles show the geographic spread. A Tale of a Feather and a Fish, from Egypt, is directed by Ahmed El Hawarey and produced by Hala Lotfy of Hassala Films and Jeanne Deny of MAD Solutions. Accept My Plea For Burial, from Somalia and Djibouti, is directed by Mohammed Sheikh and produced by Kadir Harbi of Aleel Films, according to Deadline.
The seven were drawn from the 10th edition of Aflamuna Connection, the platform's development strand. That link gives filmmakers a longer run. Work can move from an early Beirut workshop to a European market with new partners attached.
What makes this stand out is timing. Big festivals get the red carpets. Events like this, run by Cinemed director Christophe LeParc's team, decide two years earlier which films get finished at all.
