The 2021 Tribeca Festival will run from June 9-20 with live in-person events at outdoor venues across all New York City boroughs.
The Tribeca Film Festival 2021 has selected five Arab movies to screen at the event among hundreds of international films. The festival’s 20th edition will be a celebration of audiences coming back together with comedic, music-centred, and socially-conscious films from diverse storytellers.
The film festival will run from June 9-20 as a hybrid event with both in-person and virtual festivities.
The Arab movies that are set to premiere include Souad, Peace by Chocolate, No Longer Suitable for us, Simple as Water, and The Ballad of a White Cow.
Egyptian film Souad by director Ayten Amin evolves around the lives of two teenage sisters; one of them holds a secret life in the virtual world. Leading a double life, Souad presents different versions of herself to her conservative society and her tradition-flaunting peers. The film speaks volumes about various social dynamics.
The film will be screened within the festival’s International Narrative Competition, competing with five other works, all by directors from European countries.
Based on a true story, Peace by Chocolate is Canadian director Jonathan Keijser’s debut feature and tells the story of a Syrian family who flee their war-torn country after their chocolate factory is bombed, and attempt to make a new start in a rural town in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Peace by Chocolate, which is part of the Tribeca Online Premieres category, is director and actor Hatem Ali’s last role before he died in December 2020 in Egypt due to a heart attack.
Directed by New York-based filmmaker Julian Joslin, No Longer Suitable for us is competing in the shorts category. The 21-minute movie tells the story of Samir, played by British-Syrian actor Laith Nakli, a Syrian FBI informant and a single father who has built a fragile life for himself and his young son in Brooklyn.
Simple as Water, competing in the features category, is a soft-spoken feature on love, displacement, and fracturing familial relations from Academy Award-winner Megan Mylan. Between Turkey, Greece, Germany, and the US, the movie portrays the elemental bonds holding together Syrian families pulled apart by war, searching for a new life.
The Ballad of a White Cow, part of the festival’s Tribeca Critics’ Week category, is a multi-narrative about capital punishment. The main character Mina’s life turns upside down when she learns that her husband was innocent of the crime for which he was executed, so she starts a silent battle against a cynical system for her own and her daughter’s sake.
