Damascus My First Kiss
Spring Grant 2011 - Post-Production Stage
Lina Alabed / Feature Documentary / Syria, Lebanon, Qatar / 2011 / 48 min / Colour / Original Language: Arabic / Interests: Documentary
Synopsis
When I got my first period, my mother kissed me and said with a smile: “Now you are a woman. You must care about your behaviour and movements”. I did not understand what she meant until she forbade me from riding my beloved bicycle. Bringing together Damascene women from differing social and religious backgrounds, each woman shares secrets and recalls incidents connected to their awakening sexual consciousness and the limitation of their existence and desires. “Yearning” explores a woman’s place in a male society and how it affects her womanhood and her relationship to her own body.
Credits
- Director
- Lina Alabed
- Screenwriter
- Lina Alabed
- Producer
- Lina Alabed
About the Director
Lina Alabed is a Palestinian filmmaker. Born in 1980, she graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Damascus University. Her graduation project was a short documentary that was broadcast on Al Jazeera in 2007. Her second short documentary, ‘Noor Alhuda’, produced by Al-Arabiya, was awarded the DOXBOX Jury Prize for Best Syrian Documentary Film in 2010. ‘Damascus, My First Kiss’ (2012) was her first feature-length documentary. Its international premiere took place at Doc Leipzig and it was broadcast on ARTE. Alabed’s current project, ‘Ibrahim’, took the OIF Prize during the Beirut Cinema Platform in 2015.