Concrete Land

Runtime: 80'

Expected release: May, 2022

Production stage: Late Production / Post-Production

Budget: €170,000 (24% in place)

1st feature: Yes

Looking for: festivals, sales agents / distributors, buyers, co-producers, gap financing

Synopsis:

Concrete Land is an intimate look at the lives of a nomadic Bedouin family in its struggle to hold on to its traditional life under the pressures of urbanisation. Their only wish as a family is to stay together, with their loyal yet eccentric pet sheep Badrya firmly by their side.

Director’s profile:

Asmahan Bkerat is a Palestinian-Jordanian-American documentary filmmaker. Her love for cinema has led her to work in various roles on films of different scales, before setting on the path to documentary film. Bkerat’s first short documentary BADRYA won the Jury Prize for Best MiniDoc at the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival. She is currently working on her first feature- length documentary CONCRETE LAND, which got the IDFA Bertha Fund and the Doha Film Institute’s production fund. CONCRETE LAND is the first Jordanian film to be a finalist for the Whickers Awards. Asmahan is an alumnus of the IDFA Academy, DFI, the Scottish Documentary Institute, the American Film Showcase, and the RFC.

Producer’s profile:

Sahar Yousefi is an award-winning Canadian producer. She began her career at the National Film Board of Canada, where she worked on various documentaries and interactive new media, such the award-winning NFB SPACE SCHOOL. Her first feature, the Telefilm-funded documentary PLAY YOUR GENDER (2016), won the Edith Lando Peace Prize, among other accolades, and is currently playing on CBC’s Documentary Channel. Her latest project, the short animated documentary IN THE SHADOW OF THE PINES, premiered at the 2020 Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival and won best animated short at the Ottawa International Animation Film Festival and the San Francisco Film Festival, among several other awards. Yousefi is an alumnus of the Hot Docs Accelerator Program, the RIDM Talent Lab, and the BANFF Spark Accelerator.