Nada Riyadh Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Filmmaker Mohammed Almughanni’s project Son of the Streets, about a Palestinian child living in a refugee camp in Beirut, has been awarded Best Pitch at the IDFA Forum Awards. The world’s largest documentary film festival presented two additional prizes on Wednesday, including the IDFA Forum Award for Best Rough Cut to Coexistence, My Ass!, and the DocLab Forum Award to Turbulence. Each of the winners receives a cash prize of €1,500.

Lise Pedersen Moving towards a more equitable and accountable curation in film programming and selection processes, ethical representation in storytelling and the challenges posed by the lack of awareness and accountability was at the heart of a panel discussion at Cannes Docs, the Cannes Film Market event dedicated to documentary film, on May 20. Panelists included Egyptian director and producer Nada Riyadh, British-Chinese writer and director Paul Sng, Brazilian producer Yolanda Maria Barroso and Swedish producer Malin Hüber; it was moderated by the BFI’s Race Equality Lead Rico Johnson-Sinclair. Opening on a positive note, Riyadh said that, “as an Arab woman,” she welcomed the presence in the official selection at Cannes this year of docs by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (“Four Daughters,” main competition) and Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir (“The Mother of All Lies,” Un Certain Regard), even though “in the real world I still get asked whether I do docs or real films,” she added with a smile.

The prestigious Visions du Réel film festival in Nyon, Switzerland wraps up this weekend, after hosting the world premiere of dozens of documentaries.

Film Independent has set the filmmakers and projects for its 2022 Documentary Lab. The list includes Alissa Figueroa (Breaking the Blue Wall, w/t), Shalon Buskirk and Drew Swedberg (In love, in memory), Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir (Land of Women), Kit Vincent and Ed Owles (Red Herring, w/t), Alix Blair, Lauren Kushner and Elise McCave (Untitled Helen Project) and Jonathan Olshefski and Elizabeth Day (Without Arrows).