Award Winners of the 29th Arab Film Festival (AFF2025)

WOW, what an amazing film festival! We will soon share with you a recap of the best moments of AFF2025, let me just say that this was one of the best Arab Film Festival editions ever.

And now 🥁 please we are ready to announce the winners of the 29th Arab Film Festival (AFF2025).

Our festival jury, led by Jury Chair Jim Sheridan, submitted their votes – and so did you, for the Audience Award. It was tough to choose with so many outstanding films. Ready to discover who won?

Best Documentary Short – AFF2025

Like a Spiral

Directed by Lamia Chraibi
Produced by Productions Leitmotiv – Patricia Bergeron, Ghassan Fayad

West Coast Premiere

Like a Spiral is a dialogue between Beirut and five women, migrant domestic workers, under the Kafala system. Expressing their belonging to a society in collapse, the women’s voices rise through the film’s grainy images to denounce their stolen freedom with an inalienable thirst for existence. Their memories dance in the rhythm of oppression. Caught within life’s spiral, they lift themselves up to not sink into oblivion.

About the Filmmaker:

Lamia Chraibi is a French-Moroccan filmmaker based in Montreal. She is particularly interested in the themes of social justice, identity, family and territory. She also deals with subjects related to body language and social art. The human being is at the heart of her approach. Her studies in social science (Sorbonne, Paris) and in documentary (INIS, Montreal) have shaped her sensitive and committed

Best Narrative Short (Tied) – AFF2025

Abu Judy

Directed by Adel Ahmed Yahya
Produced by Safie Eddeen Mahmoud, Baho Bakhsh, Yassmin Hamed

North American Premiere

Judy a 10 years old girl used to go with her father to work. One day an unusual situation happens that will cause a major challenge in their relationship!

About the Filmmaker:

Adel Ahmed Yehia is an Egyptian filmmaker who graduated from the High Cinema Institute in Egypt. He made his directorial debut with a short film “Nada” in 2018 as his graduation project that won him many awards at regional and international film festivals. Adel is currently working on his first feature film, continuing to develop his unique cinematic voice in the industry.

Everything Will Disappear

Directed by Shaden Safieddine Tazi

West Coast Premiere

Back in Morocco after a long journey, Amira (21) discovers that her grandfather is suffering from Alzheimer’s and realizes that she is the only family member he has forgotten.

About the Filmmaker:

Shaden Safieddine Tazi is a Moroccan-Lebanese screenwriter and director based in Paris. After studying Film History at Columbia University, she directed the short film Everything Will Disappear and is currently editing the 30-minute mixed-media documentary Je n’attends plus l’été while writing her first feature. Her work is an exploration of human vulnerability, the passage and dislocation of time, the fractures in personal and collective memory, and the painful yet beautiful transition to adulthood.
Shaden’s projects have been featured in several festivals and publications, including A Rabbit’s Foot, Yung Magazine, and Menart Fair.

Best Animated Short – AFF2025

My Brother, My Brother

Directed by Saad and Abdelrahman Dnewar

My Brother, My Brother is an autofiction animation film that explores the complexities of a past shared by two identical twins: Omar and Wesam. A split narrative retells the two sides of their memories – from the instant they were fused together in their mother’s womb to the moment they are parted by the tragic death of one of them. Tied together by the twins’ confusion about their existence, a fragmented world of memories and dreams emerges, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, present and past, Omar and Wesam.

About the Filmmakers:

Abdelrahman Dnewar is a filmmaker from Egypt, who is based in Berlin, Germany. He started his film career in 2012 when his first animated short film “The Super Twins” was selected by the Ghetto Film School in Los Angeles to be shown at their section in Sundance Film Festival.
Abdelrahman is currently a student at the DFFB Film Academy in Berlin. He always tries to employ his knowledge of visual arts to find the right cinematic language and medium to tell his stories and has experience working across different mediums of visual arts and film.
Filmography:
“Moses Sole”, Abdelrahman Dnewar, Saad Dnewar, 2022, 5’, short film, unreleased, Director
“Rewind”, 2021, 4’, music video, Cairo Video Festival, Director

Saad Dnewar was a filmmaker from Egypt based in Berlin, Germany. He was a multidisciplinary artist working across different mediums varying from animation to live-action. He received his first international recognition with his short film in development ‘My Brother, My Brother’. He was selected to study directing at the dffb with his brother in 2022 but he passed away one month before the study commenced at the young age of 29.

Best Documentary Feature – AFF2025

Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk

Directed by Sepideh Farsi
Produced by Sepideh Farsi, Annie Ohayon-Dekel, Javad Djavaherry

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk offers an intimate, first-hand perspective of life under siege in Gaza, captured through video calls between director Sepideh Farsi and 25- year-old Palestinian photojournalist and poet Fatma Hassona. Combining raw immediacy with deep humanity, the film captures daily life during the ongoing war on Gaza through the eyes and unwaveringly optimistic presence of Fatma, a talented photographer whose generation is trapped in an endless cycle of war, starvation, and resistance. Her conversations with Farsi bring us into the heart of the conflict, even while their physical distance underscores the dire situation inside Gaza. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is an essential document that now stands as a heartfelt memorial and final testament: Fatma and her family were tragically killed by a targeted Israeli airstrike on April 16, one day after the film was announced as a selection of the Cannes Film Festival.

About the Filmmaker:

Iranian director Sepideh Farsi experienced the revolution at 13, was imprisoned at 16 as a dissident, and left her native Iran at 18. Based in Paris since then, she has studied mathematics, taken photos, and made some fifteen films — documentaries, fiction, and animation — among which Tehran Without Authorization (Locarno), Red Rose (TIFF), and The Siren, a feature animation that deals with the Iran- Iraq war, which was the opening film of Berlinale Panorama and has won numerous awards since.

She is currently working on an “Iranian Western” film project, and also developing an animation project inspired by her life, called Memoirs of an Undutiful Girl, all the while fighting for the instauration of democracy in Iran.

Best Narrative Feature – AFF2025

All That’s Left of You

Directed by Cherien Dabis
Produced by Thanassis Karathanos, Karim Amer, Martin Hampel, Cherien Dabis

Jordan’s submission to the Oscars

A deeply moving, multigenerational drama, All That’s Left of You follows a Palestinian teenager who gets swept into a protest in the Occupied West Bank and experiences a moment of violence that rocks his family. The film unfolds as his mother recounts the political and emotional threads that led to that fateful moment. Spanning seven decades, the film traces the hopes and heartaches of one uprooted family, bearing witness to the scars of dispossession and the enduring legacy of survival.

About the Filmmaker:

Cherien Dabis is a Palestinian American filmmaker and actress who has established herself as a creative force across a variety of mediums. Having helped forge a new genre of Arab American storytelling, she brings authenticity, complexity, and humanity to the stories she writes, directs, and performs, spotlighting underrepresented perspectives with humor and humanity.

Dabis got her start with her trailblazing debut feature Amreeka, which she wrote and directed. Exploring the immigrant journey of a Palestinian single mom, the film had its world premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival before going on to win the coveted FIPRESCI International Critics Prize in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. It won a dozen more international awards and was nominated for a Best Picture Gotham Award, three Independent Spirit Awards including Best Picture, Best First Screenplay and Best Actress, and was named one of the Top Ten Independent Films of the Year by the National Board of Review. The film landed Dabis on Variety’s “Ten Directors to Watch” list that same year.

A true multi-hyphenate, Dabis made her acting debut when she starred opposite Bill Pullman and Alia Shawkat in her second feature film, 2013 Sundance opener May in the Summer, which she also wrote and directed, a dramedy about a Palestinian American writer who returns home to reconnect with her roots. Dabis has also showcased her signature approach into television, executive producing and directing standout episodes of Golden Globe-winning Ramy for Hulu and guest starring in Netflix’s Gotham and Peabody award- winning
Mo. In 2022, she was nominated for an Emmy Award for ‘Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series’ for the critically acclaimed and groundbreaking episode The Boy From 6B on Hulu’s hit show Only Murders in the Building, starring comedy legends Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez. Variety hailed the dialogue-free episode of television told from the point of view of a deaf character as “the episode of the year” and “a tour de force of directorial achievement.” In addition to directing additional standout episodes in season two and three, Dabis’ television directorial credits also include episodes of Netflix’s Ozark. Additional television acting credits include Prime Video’s Fallout and Apple TV+’s Extrapolations.

Dabis resides in New York City.

Audience Award – AFF2025

Palestine 36

Written and directed by Annemarie Jacir
Produced by Ossama Bawardi

Palestine’s submission to the Oscars

1936. As villages across Mandatory Palestine rise against British colonial rule, Yusuf drifts between his rural home and the restless energy of Jerusalem, longing for a future beyond the growing unrest. But history is relentless. With rising numbers of Jewish immigrants escaping antisemitism in Europe, and the Palestinian population uniting in the largest and longest uprising against Britain’s 30-year dominion, all sides spiral towards inevitable collision in a decisive moment for the British Empire and the future of the entire region.

About the Filmmaker:

Annemarie Jacir has written, directed and produced over sixteen films. Her films have premiered in Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam and Toronto. All three of her feature films were selected as Palestine’s official Oscar Entry. Her short film Like Twenty Impossible (2003) was the first Arab short film in history to be selected in Cannes and continued to break ground as a finalist for the Academy Awards.

In 2007, Jacir shot the first feature film by a Palestinian female director, the acclaimed Salt of This Sea, her second work to debut in Cannes, Salt of this Sea went on to win the FIPRESCI Critics Award, and fourteen other international awards including Best Film in Milan. Her second feature When I Saw You won Best Asian Film at the Berlinale and garnered a nomination at the Asian Pacific Screen Awards. Working in both fiction and documentary, other films include Until When, A Few Crumbs for the Birds, and A Post Oslo History. Recently Wajib (2017) won 36 international awards including Mar Del Plata, Dubai, and London BFI Festival.

With a commitment to mentoring, training and hiring locally, Annemarie also teaches, actively promoting independent cinema in the region. Founder of Philistine Films, she collaborates regularly as an editor, screenwriter and producer with fellow filmmakers. She has served as a jury member to numerous festivals including in Cannes, Sundance and Berlin, is a member of the Asia Pacific Screen Academy, AMPAS and BAFTA. Her fourth feature film Palestine 36 is her most ambitious project to date.

In 2019, New York’s prestigious BAM art center held the first retrospective of her work. Most recently the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) hosted her in a retrospective of her work, screening many works for the first time. In November 2024, she was granted a BlackStar Luminary Award. In 2022, she directed for the groundbreaking Hulu hit series Ramy. She has been granted an honorary doctorate by Artois University in France for her contribution to cinema. She lives and works in Palestine.

Did you come to the Arab Film Festival this year? Which film did you like the most? Tell us in the comments!