Last chance to catch the Reykjavik Shorts & Docs Festival 2013

The annual  Reykjavik Shorts & Docs film festival ends tomorrow, May 16^th. The festival features both short films, animations and documentary films from around the world. The festival especially strives to include new talent and to offer a cozy atmosphere for the screenings and aims at showing films that are challenging, sexy, funny outrageous and exucational or otherwise films that are essential viewing.

For a full scedule and more info, check the festival's website.

Despite its two screenings being over in Iceland, if you should get the chance to see A World Not Ours anywhere, I would like to particularly recommend it, and give it five stars out of five. It depicts multiple generations of Palestinians living in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon.

This proved an incredibly moving film, educational, intimate, personal and affectionate, surprisingly humourous at times and very well made. While learning about the plight of the people and daily life in the camp, you develop a real empathy for them. There’s the director's traumatised and eccentric uncle Said, the disillusioned Abu Eyad, the director's best friend, who seeks to escape the camp, the director’s grandfather, holding on to his right of return, alternatively sweet as a pie and cursing the kids playing football in his garden and the camp being transformed for a few weeks once a year as Palestinians gather to watch the World Cup. Themes of identity, belonging, family ties and friendship are all illuminated in this marvelous film. The trailer is below.