The 14th edition of Middle East Now 2023 has just ended.
A rich programme, followed by a large, passionate and attentive audience, with crowded theaters in the evening, afternoon and matinee screenings, with 35 films premiering (Italian, European, international) awarded in the best international festivals and coming from many countries in the area Middle Eastern, as well as food, meetings, debates and cultural projects.
“A beautiful yet difficult edition – say the founders and directors of the festival Lisa Chiari and Roberto Ruta – we strongly felt the risk of trivializing the contents of the Festival in such a delicate moment, but we decided with determination to speak to our audience as we have always done over the last 14 years, bringing stories to deal with and through which to try to understand more. Culture, art, cinema must always remain free and tools with which to go beyond politics and divisions. The festival as a cultural project is an instrument of knowledge and in-depth analysis that is even more important at this time to create a dialogue and try to be a bridge that unites".
"Best OFF Award” Cinema has awarded the “Best OFF Special Mention” to an ethnographic film full of poetry and beauty, THE RETURN di Fatemeh Marzbani (Kurdistan, Iran, 2023), “which captures the daily life of Ata Tazik, a former smuggler turned fisherman, with a gaze that neither tries to explain nor judge, but simply shows us a reality contained in the final sentences of the film: the world we live in is full of wonders, if we want to know it more deeply, a good way to do it is to simply observe it.”
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