Author: Deborah Young

The topic is marriage and the four compulsively watchable stories that make up Noha Adel’s ‘Spring Came Laughing’ nail the shallowness, hypocrisy and suffering of Egyptian middle-class women, caught in a web outdated traditions.

A captivating story, at once simple and profound, describes the relationship between a blind boy and his loving grandfather as they travel through the desert in Daoud Aoulad-Syad’s layered road movie, ‘The Blue Lake’.

Shot over a year ago by students in a filmmaking workshop in Gaza, ‘Gazan Tales’ is a disarming snapshot of four men’s everyday lives, as they pass their days unaware of the disaster about to befall them

 Popular director Chen Sicheng  brings Mai Jia’s bestseller ‘Decoded’ to the screen in a wildly imaginative if often confusing genre-buster that co-stars John Cusack as a brilliant mathematician pitted against his even more brilliant Chinese pupil.