Projects 2026-2027

CLOSE UP

We are proud to unveil the 13 powerful documentary projects selected for the 2026–2027 Close Up Program from across Southwest Asia and North Africa.

This year, we received 134 remarkable submissions. The caliber of storytelling, representing voices from 19 different countries, was exceptional.

The 2026-2027 selected projects offer an urgent and profoundly moving exploration of memory, displacement, and the struggle against oppression. From unearthing forgotten family archives and confronting the enduring scars of conflict and colonial violence to documenting radical acts of community resistance, these 13 films traverse deeply personal and political landscapes. Together, they capture the fragile yet fierce ways people confront the structures of violence, reclaim their histories, rebuild their identities, and make their voices heard.

JINWAR LAND OF WOMEN

Beyan Salah Taher

Inside Jinwar—the world’s only women-only village in northeast Syria—filmmaker Beyan follows Yasemin and her daughter Evin as they navigate a changing Syria, from the Assad regime to the current transitional government. Struggling to fit into a world shaped by patriarchal power, they endure sacrifice to defend the sanctuary they built for future generations.

OUMI

Sara Glaoua

After discovering a long-held secret about her mother’s adoption in 1960s Morocco, filmmaker Sara Glaoua sets out to uncover her mother’s origins, confronting the silence and unanswered questions that have shaped them both.

REAR SHADOW

Kaveh Mazaheri

Living in a European city where he struggles with a new language, an Iranian filmmaker is haunted by a recurring pattern: always arriving too late to save what matters. Told in four connected episodes, the film explores absence, memory, and regret.

RINGS ON THE WATER

Mohanad Salahat

Returning to his Palestinian village after his father’s death, a diaspora filmmaker’s search for lost family archives turns into an urgent chronicle of his relatives’ daily struggles against drought, imprisonment, and the looming threat of displacement.

SHOOTING DAYS

Moran Ifergan

An urban film diary of a mother and her son in Tel Aviv–Jaffa, set against the human collapse of a nation and society. The film follows the director and her son, through their daily lives, amid the terrible war that is taking place outside Tel Aviv but deep in their souls.

SUMMER HOLIDAYS

Hunay Saday

Disguised as a “summer vacation,” a family flees Baku after political persecution makes their return impossible. 15 years later, the daughter revisits that moment through archives and reunions, tracing the bonds and spaces that shaped her identity.

THE ABSENCE OF 1

Varduhi Balyan

Returning to her grandmother’s village after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, the filmmaker starts reconstructing a lost world through 6,000 forgotten photographs taken by a hunter and photographer from her childhood, displaced from Soviet Azerbaijan decades earlier. As intimacy grows, the search for memory becomes an inquiry into violence, care, and the contradictions they both inherit.

2025 Amputee Football Asian Championship

THE IRAQI WARRIORS

Karrar Al-Azzawi

After losing their legs in wartime tragedies, Kareem and Abdullah struggle to overcome immense physical and emotional challenges to join the Iraqi national amputee football team. Will they suceed and find meaning after wounds that were meant to destroy them?

THIS IS NOT MY SEA

Elene Mikaberidze

10 members of a family, separated by the Abkhaz-Georgian war in 1992, reunite to care for their matriarch Lara with Alzheimer’s. As she loses her memory, they struggle to remember their past while facing old wounds and new conflicts.

UNTITLED

An exiled filmmaker from Afghanistan

An Afghan filmmaker in exile tries to finish an unfinished film by reconnecting with the character he lost to displacement.

WHEN THE MOUNTAINS FELL

Mohammad Shaikhow

Bahzad, a Yazidi activist, has turned his small office into a memory of a genocide. As the world moves on and thousands remain missing, he must decide how long he can go on being the one who remembers.

WHEN TIME DISSOLVES INTO SILENCE

Faiçal Benghrou

After 21 years of silence with his father, a filmmaker returns to his grandfather’s remote home in northern Morocco to confront the inherited silence of three generations marked by the lasting scars of colonialism and military discipline.

YOU LITTLE BOX

Mert Kaya

After three decades on air, Turkey’s last independent community radio station loses its FM license by state order. As those who make it carry on without the airwaves, the film traces how a connection is built, severed, and remade under pressure.

Alia