LYD to hold its world premiere at Amman International Film Festival

release date August 15 2023

Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland’s documentary LYD will be holding its world premiere at the fourth edition of the Amman International Film Festival - Awal Film, which is set to take place from August 15 to 22 in the Jordanian capital.

The film will be screened twice at the festival — the first on Saturday, August 19th at 8 pm at Taj Cinema 6, and the second on Sunday, August 20th at 9 pm at the Rainbow Theater. Both screenings will be followed by a Q&A session with the film’s directors, who will discuss everything from the difficulties they faced in shooting a film like this vis-a-vis regional and ethnic tensions and the research they conducted to bring this project to life among other things.

Also, in anticipation of the film’s fast-approaching premiere, MAD Solutions — the film’s worldwide distributor and sales agent — recently released the film’s teaser trailer on a number of social media platforms, which you can watch here:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CvuLVbLN1_I/?igshid=NjIwNzIyMDk2Mg==

LYD is a sci-fi documentary that follows the rise and fall of Lyd — a 5,000-year-old metropolis that was once a bustling Palestinian town until it was conquered when the State of Israel was established in 1948.

As the film unfolds, a chorus of characters creates a tapestry of the Palestinian experience of this city and the trauma left by the massacre and expulsion.

Rami Younis is a Palestinian filmmaker, writer, and journalist from Lyd. Younis currently hosts a daily news show called ‘On the Other Hand,’ where he exposes fake news and counters misinformation about Israeli Palestinian residents.

Meanwhile, Sarah Ema Friedland is a New York-based documentary filmmaker and media artist. Friedland’s works have screened widely in the US and abroad and have been broadcast nationally on PBS.