'Salma’s Home', directed by Hanadi Elyan, won the Jordan Film Fund for post-production.
Jordanian film Salma’s Home by Hanadi Elyan will screen at the Arab Film Festival in San Francisco on Saturday, November 19th at 2:45 pm (GMT-7) at the Roxie Theater.
The film festival is scheduled to take place from November 11 to 20, 2022.
In October, the film screened at four film festivals in the US including Heartland International Film Festival in Indiana; Austin Film Festival in Texas; Arab American National Museum Arab Film Festival in Michigan; and Boston Palestine Film Festival. Internationally, the film was shown at the American University in Cairo’s Tahrir Cultural Center, and actress Juliet Awad won awards at the Malmo Film Festival in Sweden.
The film had its world premiere at the Cinequest Film and Creativity Festival in San Jose, US, where it won the Best Feature Film (Global Vision Award) and was nominated for best feature film at the Atlanta Film Festival.
In July, Salma’s Home was released exclusively on Netflix in the Middle East and North Africa region, where it ranked in the top 10 of the platform’s most-watched films for three weeks in a row.
Prior to its Netflix release, the film premiered in Jordan at Taj Cinemas in the presence of the cast, crew, critics, and media figures.
Salma’s Home is set in Jordan and revolves around three women with distinct personalities. Salma (Juliet Awad) is a talented baker living alone in a large old house overlooking downtown Amman running a nonprofitable home-based bakery, and her daughter Farah (Sameera Asir) is a young working mother with marital problems with her husband Malek (Firas Taybeh).
Their lives are disrupted by the death of Salma’s ex-husband. The funeral occurs at his current wife’s house, Lamia (Rania Kurdi), an aspiring socialite obsessed with social media. After the funeral, uncle Emad (Waleed Jizawi) brings shocking information to light leading to territorial clashes and finally forcing the three women to accept some harsh realities and take control of their lives.
Written and directed by Hanadi Elyan, Salma’s Home has received Best Feature Film Global Vision Award at Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival in San Jose, California. The film stars Juliet Awad, Sameera Asir, Rania Kurdi and Firas Taybeh, and is produced by Reel LA Productions (producer Nathan Bennett). MAD Solutions handles the film’s distribution in the Arab world.
Elyan is a Palestinian-Jordanian filmmaker whose work focuses on the social issues facing marginalised communities from a female perspective. She started her film career in Jordan then moved to Dubai and helped establish Reel Arab Productions. Later, she moved to Los Angeles after being selected for a full-ride scholarship, where she earned her MFA in Film Production/Directing from UCLA. Elyan currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Narrative Film Directing at Emerson College.
