The Borrowed Dress Takes Part in the Karama Beirut Human Rights Film Festival

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Making Its Arab World Premiere

The Borrowed Dress Takes Part in the Karama Beirut Human Rights Film Festival


The documentary film The Borrowed Dress by director Leen Alfaisal is going to make its Arab world premiere at the 3rd Karama Beirut Human Rights Film Festival in Lebanon, which will be taking place starting Tuesday, July 17 at Metropolis Empire Sofil Cinema in Achrafieh. The film will be screened on Wednesday, July 18 at 09:30 PM with the attendance of its director.

The Karama Beirut Human Rights Film Festival is a subsidiary of Jordan's Karama Human Rights Film Festival that was founded in 2010. With a program that includes film screenings and year-round human rights events, the festival contributes, among other well-established and renowned festivals in the world, to spreading a Human Rights Cinema that denounces racism, hatred discourse, discrimination and injustice. Aiming to mobilize solidarity and support with the minorities, the festival screens a selection of films from around the world, and holds open discussions to shed light on human rights violations worldwide and the prospects of social change and progress.

Recently, The Borrowed Dress won the Best Documentary award at the Silk Road International Film Festival (SRIFF). The film world premiered at the London International Filmmaker Festival of World Cinema, where it competed for the Best Foreign Language Documentary, Best Director of a Foreign Language Documentary and the Best Editing of a Short Documentary.

Grandmother Susu (80 years old), her daughter Doaa (50 years old), and her grandchild Saad (16 years old) are forced to flee Syria after the beginning of the revolution to live in different scattered places, with the one thing left to share being their desire to reunite. The details of their personal stories and human experiences are microcosms of two stories: one of a population that has spread all over the world, and the other of a homeland that might have changed forever.

Written and directed by Leen Alfaisal, The Borrowed Dress is produced by Sarah Hassan and Alaa Alassad (Creative Media Solutions). The film stars Siham Abu Nabbout, Doaa Al Zoabi and Saad Alkuwatly. The Borrowed Dress is distributed by MAD Solutions in the Arab world.

Leen Alfaisal is a Dubai-based video producer and camerawoman working at CNN International. Alfaisal
graduated with honors from the American University in Dubai, with a major in journalism and a minor in Middle Eastern Studies and documentary film.

The Borrowed Dress is her first venture into feature documentary directing. She directed her first short documentary film, Without a Frame, during university, which made it into the final selection of the Original Narrative Student Short Film Festival in Dubai and the Arab Short Film Festival in Beirut.