Upcoming
23 Feb 2018
Congratulations to Soudade Kaadan! The Syrian filmmaker, international guest artist at Villa Romana in 2014, has received the Baumi Script Development Award, endowed with 20,000 euros, for her planned second feature film NEZOUH.
The jury’s reasoning: "Soudade Kaadan tells very poetically the topical story about a less known aspect from the war in Syria. The Arabic word NEZOUH means expulsion. However, under this circumstances, young Syrian women experience for the first time to live alone and separated from the family. Almost unnoticed by the current reporting, there is always some freedom in the middle of the war chaos. The subtle narrative of Soudade Kaadan with her wonderful cinematic images touched us deeply as a jury and immediately took us into her world. Already in the treatment she finds concrete scenes about the great topics of war and expulsion."The jury, which consists of the prize sponsors Pandora Film, the Baumgartner family and the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, decided on 46 international applications.
This year's guest juror, actress Martina Gedeck, presented the award within the framework of the NRW Berlinale press lunch. "With dreamlike security, Soudade Kaadan exposes the various layers of destruction," says Gedeck. "It combines human powerlessness with willpower, despair with confidence, darkness with promise. In the midst of the war, there are islands of pause, in which life points out beyond death and thus defeats it."
