News

f.l.t.r.t.t.b.: Cara Holmes, Nadia Louis-Desmarchais, Aboozar Amini and Rolla Tahir 

Four brand new projects have been selected for New Dawn. An independent committee selected 2 documentaries and 2 feature films from a total of 41 applications. 

The projects and film makers were chosen for their unique voices and perspectives, their compelling commitment to telling these stories in a way that seamlessly aligns with New Dawn’s mission and will, according to the committee, contribute to a more open and inclusive film industry. The selected projects are: 

Documentary

Composées (Canada) 

Director & Script: Nadia Louis-Desmarchais
Producer: Pimiento Médias
Logline: Like a multi-layered collective story, Composées immerses itself in the director’s quest for identity in the face of the conflicting relationship she’s had since childhood with her own mixed-race identity. She revisits her childhood archive videos and meets with eight other women in order to explore the heart of the torn identity that they all experience on a daily basis. Through poetic, intimate and sensory imagery, Composées plunges to the heart of the universal need of belonging. 

Lesbian Lines (Ireland) 

Director & Script: Cara Holmes
Producer: Keeper Pictures
Logline: An intimate docu-fiction film about a network of underground telephone helplines, revealing how and why these urgently needed helplines were set up by a small community of Irish lesbians.  

Feature Film

Jude & the Jinn (Canada)

Director & Script: Rolla Tahir
Producer: Qareen Inc, Fugitive Works Studios and Magic Carpet Productions 
Logline: Between no longer and not yet, there exists Jude, a thirty-something nubian newcomer, who spirals into a pit of depression shortly after her father is deported, which she is aided out of when she meets and befriends a jinn. 

Tahmina (Netherlands, Canada, Germany)  

Director/Script: Aboozar Amini
Producer: Silk Road Films 
Logline: A corpse must be whole for the soil to accept it, believes Tahmina, a goddess of the Hindu Kush Mountains, who scours the explosion sites for human organs. She reassembles the blown-up bodies to allow their souls pass onto the afterworld. But things find a way to go wrong… 

Previously selected New Dawn projects include My Favourite Cake by Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam, and winner of the New Voice Award 2023 (Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival) Augure by Baloji.

New Dawn is supported by the following film institutes and funds: Communauté Française de Belgique- Centre du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel; Flanders Audiovisual Fund; Film Fund Luxembourg; Finnish Film Foundation; Norwegian Film Institute; Swedish Film Institute; Screen Ireland; Telefilm Canada; Instituto Português do Cinema e do Audiovisual and Netherlands Film Fund.