Financial support is provided by City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.
2022-2023 is the eighth year that the San Diego Arab Film Festival is receiving support from the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. This recognition and support represents an important milestone for the Festival and for San Diego’s Arab Community: it shows that Arab culture is an important part of the fabric of San Diego! In addition, on-going support from the Arts and Culture Commission helps lay the groundwork for the Festival’s growth as a dynamic part of San Diego’s cultural life.
The Poem We Sang is a 20-minute, color and black and white, experimental documentary that meditates on love and longing – the love of one’s family and the longing for one’s home, contemplated through overcoming the trauma of loss of family home and of forced migration, transforming lifelong regrets into a healing journey of creative catharsis and bearing witness. The Poem We Sang is at once deeply personal and fiercely nostalgic – a tribute to the director’s uncle my family, and an ode to their lost family home in Palestine.
Arzé is a struggling single mother living in Beirut with her agoraphobic older sister and teenage son, Kinan. Supporting the family by making homemade pies delivered on foot by her son, Arzé knows that the business can only sustain them for so long. In a move of desperation, she steals her sister’s cherished bracelet to pawn for the down payment on a delivery scooter. But disaster strikes when the scooter is stolen, jeopardizing her only way to provide for her family. Up against a ticking clock to either find the scooter or a way to pay for it in full, Arzé and Kinan embark on a wild journey through the turbulent but vibrant, multiethnic Levantine capital in pursuit of the pilfered moped.