Safar: Borders of Heaven + Q&A

We are offering a special multibuy deal for the Safar Film Festival: book tickets for three or more individual films and get them for £9 each

A Q&A with curator Rasha Salti and actress Anissa Daoud follows the screening.

Sara (Anissa Daoud) and Samy (Lotfi Abdelli), a beautiful middle-class, thirty-something couple, are comfortably settled in Tunis. She is a school teacher with a passion for singing, and he is an architect. When their five-year-old daughter, Yasmine (Sophie Ghodhbane), passes away in a fatal accident, their lives are thrown into complete disarray. Racked by guilt because his daughter died while under his watch, wallowing in inconsolable grief and numbing his pain with alcohol, Samy withdraws gradually from his life and the couple, until he becomes totally dysfunctional. Sara learns to assuage her grief by focusing on singing. The death of a patriarch in Samy’s native rural town compels him to make the long car trip, where he has to confront issues that have remained unresolved since his childhood.

Borders of Heaven (Chbabek el-Jenna), dir. Fares Naanaa, Tunisia/France/United Arab Emirates 2015, 86 minutes. Arabic with English subtitles.