Yassmina Karajah’s short film AMBUSH is set to have its world premiere at the 50th anniversary of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which is running from September 4th to the 14th.
 
A pop-up techno club ambushes the streets of downtown Amman, flooding a conservative neighborhood with heavy bass and unfamiliar faces. Jana arrives, newly sober and wrestling with intimacy. While across the street, Hasan watches from his family’s rooftop, anticipating a long-overdue encounter. The film is an urban portrait of bodies and their fleeting pre-dawn desires.
 
Speaking on her film, Karajah stated: “This film is my love letter to my hometown. A visual poem and a youth anthem for Amman: Urgent, fragile, and full of contradictions. We’re celebrating and grieving the cities and people that have shaped and failed us. This is a film about Arab tenderness, in forms we rarely see: Arab men who are vulnerable and multidimensional; Arab women who are not victims, but complex protagonists.”
 
AMBUSH stars Sereene Khass and Emad Al Kobari, is produced by Rula Nasser in tandem with her company The Imaginarium Films, shot by Farhad Ghaderi, edited by Abdallah Sada, and distributed in the Arab World by MAD Distribution.
 
Yassmina Karajah is a Jordanian Palestinian screenwriter and director whose short films have screened at the Toronto, AFI, Dubai, and Melbourne film festivals, among others. Her debut short LIGHT was released in 2015, and her subsequent 2018 short film RUPTURE premiered at Toronto and was part of the MoMA’s New Directors/New Films. It also won the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance, where she was the first recipient of the Russo Brothers’ Fellowship. Her 2025 short film AMBUSH seeks to blend documentary elements with fiction.