COLLECTIVE MEMBERS
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In November 2021, Aida completed a course in screenwriting and cinematography research from Le GREC institute in Corsica Island. She directed her debut short film Strawberry in 2017, and is currently working on producing her second short film.
Aida Kaadan
Palestinian Filmmaker, screenwriter and a Radio host, with an interest in film language and film critique.
Assia Tamerdjent
Algerian filmmaker based in Paris.
Assia Tamerdjent is a young filmmaker born in Relizane, Algeria. After studying architecture at EPAU in Algiers and human and social sciences at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, she decided to turn to cinema to document the realities of her country.
Assia took part in the Lab Doc Méditalents, the Cité des Arts in Paris and the Friche Belle de Mai residency in Marseille.
Hana, Algeria and I, her first feature-length documentary supported by France's CNC, among others, is currently in development.
Asmae studied at La Fémis in Paris and holds a master's degree in production from the Superior Institute of Information and Communication in Rabat. She has directed short documentaries for SNRT, Al Jazeera Documentary, BBC and Al Araby TV and her films have won awards at festivals worldwide. She completed the mid-length film, The Postcard, in 2020.
The Mother of All Lies is her first theatrical feature film.
Asmae El Moudir
Paris and Rabat-based director, screenwriter and producer.
With her own production company, Henia Production, she develops Tunisian author driven documentaries distinguished at Visions du Réel, IDFA, Cinémed...
In 2018, her breakout feature documentary, Railway Men, remained six weeks in Tunisian theaters. In 2021, she wrote, directed and produced her first fiction feature, Under the Fig Trees, which was presented at the Directors’ Fortnight (Cannes Film Festival 2022) and in about fourteenth festivals around the world.
Under The Fig Trees was selected to represent Tunisia at the 2023 Academy Awards.
Erige Sehiri
French-Tunisian director and producer.
Founding member
In her time as an Assistant Director, she worked with various local and international directors including Yossry Nasrallah, Maurice Sweeney and Eric Barbier. Her most notable film, A Present from the Past, opened to wide critical acclaim in numerous national and international film festivals, and was the first of its kind to set a record for audience demand in Egyptian independent theatres.
Kawthar currently works as a producer on TV commercials, short films and scripted series (including the upcoming Netflix Original Abla Fahita series).
Kawthar Younis
Egyptian filmmaker who studied film directing at the High Cinema Institute in Cairo.
Founding member
After studying History and Political Science at La Sorbonne University, Lina worked as a programmer for the International Human Rights Film Festival in Buenos Aires.
Lina’s debut feature documentary Their Algeria premiered in Visions du Réel 2020, was released in French Theatres in 2021 and received several awards. Lina acted in three feature films directed by Hafsia Herzi, Hiam Abbass and Rayhana.
In 2020, she worked as a researcher and writing coordinator on the series OUSSEKINE (Disney+).
Her second feature length documentary, Bye Bye Tiberias premiered in 2023 at The 80th Venice International Film Festival and received several awards. It was chosen to represent Palestine at the Oscars 2024 and was nominated in the Best Documentary category at the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards.
Lina Soualem
Egyptian filmmaker who studied film directing at the High Cinema Institute in Cairo.
Founding member
Lina Soualem
French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actress, born and based in Paris.
Founding member
Danielle, born in 1980 in Beirut, obtained a PhD in documentary & anthropological cinema in 2010 in France. Her academic work was related to the Bedouin habitations in Syria. She directed for that purpose 10 films; screened in ethnographic international film festivals. In parallel she directed experimental videos and film essays and teached in Film and Art schools.
Danielle co-directed her first feature-length creative documentary Embodied Chorus, that premiered at IDFA 2023 (Luminous section). She is currently the Director of the Film and Audiovisual Directing School at ALBA-UOB in Lebanon and is developping film projects.
Danielle Davie
Filmmaker and filmic anthropologist.
Founding member
Dina Nasr
Jordanian/Palestinian director and producer.
Founding member
She was awarded the Docnomads scholarship in 2013 to pursue a Master's Degree in Documentary Filmmaking. In 2012, she began filming her debut feature documentary, Tiny Souls, which follows the lives of Marwa and her sibling in the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan over a span of five years. Tiny Souls premiered in 2019 at CPH:DOX and was selected for festivals such as Sheffield DocFest, IDFA, DOK Leipzig, and Busan. The film won the Human Rights Film Award at Dokufest and the Sunbird Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Palestine Film Festival, among other accolades.
Dina also directed the award-winning short film One Minute, a sound-driven piece depicting a woman's life in Gaza during the 2014 attacks.
Dina's most recent work is SUKOUN/AMPLIFIED, which had its world premiere at Berlinale's Generation Kplus 2024 and received a Special Mention award and the Black Bear Award for Sound Design at the Athens International Film + Video Festival. In 2017, Dina founded a multimedia production company, Madd Moshawash, with the vision of reflecting reality and expanding fiction through producing artistic and experimental projects.
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Dorothée Myriam Kellou is a journalist turned filmmaker and writer. In 2016, she revealed in the newspaper Le Monde the scandal of Lafarge's indirect financing of the Islamic State group during the war in Syria, and received the Trace prize for investigative reporting in Washington D. C. in 2017.
In 2019, she directed A Mansourah, tu nous as séparés about the intimate memories of forcibly resettled Algerians during the Algerian War of independence in her father's native village in Kabylia. The film won several awards, including the human rights prize at the FIDADOC in Agadir in 2020 and a "Etoile de la SCAM" in 2021. Today, she presides over Rawiyat.
In 2020, she produced a two-hour sound documentary series for France culture, "L'Algérie des camps", with the support of the Albert Londres prize. The podcast further explores the consequences of mass rural uprooting on contemporary Algeria including the rise of jihadism in former resettlement camps.
In October 2023, she published her first book "Nancy-Kabylie" with France’s leading publishing house Grasset - "A reflection on the possibility of passing on memories despite all the threads broken by exile and war. "
Dorothée Myriam
Kellou
French Algerian author, journalist and filmmaker.
Founding member
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Randa Ali
Director and writer working between Los Angeles and Cairo.
Randa Ali is a director & writer working between Los Angeles and Cairo. Her last short Mango was selected in the official competition of the 46th Clermont-Ferrand Int'l Short Film Festival.
In 2021, She was awarded the ARRI Franz Weiser grant for her film Kingdom of Strangers. The film won the Jury awards at Toronto Arab Film Festival, Cairo Int'l Shorts Film Festival & Beirut Shorts.
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Myriam El Hajj
Lebanese filmmaker and actress.
Founding member
Myriam el Hajj is a Lebanese filmmaker and actress. Her first documentary film, Trêve (A Time to Rest) premiered at Visions du Réel-Nyon, before touring in many international festivals where it won several awards including the Prix Découverte Audiovisuelle de la SCAM.
Her second documentary film, Diaries from Lebanon, premiered in Berlinale-Panorama in February 2024. The film is produced by Myriam Sassine and Carine Rusznievski and has Mad Solutions as International Sales agent.
Myriam was the artistic director of Fondation Liban Cinema from 2015 till 2020. She teaches cinema at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) and is a member of several film commissions such as the CNC (French National Cinema Center) and the Fonds Image de la Francophonie (OIF), and Eurimages.
Myriam is a fellow artist of the MacDowell Residency (USA), the Cité Internationale des arts and Les Récollets (France) MacDowell residency, and NIPKOW (Germany).
Meriem Mesraoua
French-Algerian filmmaker.
Meriem Mesraoua grew up between Algeria, France and Qatar. A graduate of Northwestern University, she has worked in various facets of the industry and in 2020, her short film À fleur de peau (Under Her Skin) debuted at the Venice Film Festival. Meriem is currently developing her first feature film.
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Naziha Arebi
Founding member
Naziha returned to Libya during the revolution to work and explore her father's homeland. In 2012 she co-founded HuNa Productions, a Tripoli-based production collective, working at the intersection between art and activism, creating films around identity, gender and reconciliation with BBC, Al Jazeera, Hivos, Oxfam and NGO’s.
Naziha is a HotDocs Blue Ice and a Sundance Lab fellow, a WEF Global Shaper, and a member of Lumiere D’Afrique.
Naziha also works as a cinematographer in the MENA region, and her artwork has been published extensively in print and exhibited globally. Alongside her award winning, BAFTA nominated feature Freedom Fields (TIFF, LFF, IDFA, Ajyal, CPHdox), she is also producing feature film After A Revolution and working on her first hybrid fiction feature.
Lybian/British artist and filmmaker.
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Stephanie Amin
Independent researcher and documentary filmmaker from Egypt.
In 2020, she earned her master's degree in political sociology from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne university. In parallel, she worked as coordinator in film festivals in Egypt and France, Stephanie directed her first short film I Found my Love in Massara in the framework of the Creative Documentary workshop provided by Between Women Filmmakers Caravan which was awared for "outstanding documentary direction" at Manassat Film Festival.
Today, Stephanie is focusing her research and film on gender issues in the Arab world. Stephanie was Rawiyat's coordinator from August 2023 to April 2024, where she overviewed the collective's different activities and especially the launching of Rawiyat's first ever autonomous mentorship program.
She is currently working on her second documentary short entitled Elle, Camilya which she devleopped during the L'Ateler residency organized by Côté Court and Cinémas 93 as well working on different research projects pertaining to gender studies, coptic studies and digital humanities.
Sonia Ben Slama
French-Tunisian documentary filmmaker.
Sonia grew up in Paris, where she studied art and cinema at the Université Paris 3-Sorbonne-Nouvelle. In 2015, she directed her first feature-length documentary Maktoub in Tunisia.
Her second film, Machtat, also shot in Tunisia, is part of the international competition at Visions du Réel (Nyon) and in the Acid-Cannes 2023 selection. She is currently developing a new documentary project, 316 North Main Street, shot in the USA.
Sofia Alaoui
French-Moroccan director and screenwriter.
Sofia Alaoui came to prominence with her short film Qu'importe si les bêtes meurent, which won the Grand Prix du Jury at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020 and the César for best fiction short in 2021. Her first feature film, Animalia, premiered at Sundance in 2023, where it won the Special Jury Prize.
Sofia Alaoui then moved into television series, and is currently working on a detective series, Let the Earth Burn. At the same time, she is working on two feature film projects: Tarfaya, set in the Moroccan desert, and The Delta at Sunset, her first English-language film. She was named by screendaily ARAB STAR OF TOMOROW and one of the 10 to Watch by Unifrance 2024, which each year highlights new French talent to watch.
Zain Duraie
Jordanian writer and director.
Her debut film Horizon had its world premiere in 2013 at Palm Springs Shorts fest and won Best of the Fest Selects. Her last short film Give Up the Ghost has been officially selected in 2019 at the La Biennale Di Venezia main shorts competition and is the very first Jordanian female filmmaker to enter the Orizzonti shorts Competition.
Duraie has won El Gouna Prize for Best Arab short, Vimeo Staff Pick award at the Palm Springs Shorts Fest, and many more awards all over the world.
Zahraa Ghandour
Iraqi actress, director and producer.
Zahra is the executive producer and co-founder of KARADA films production company based in Baghdad.
Starting her career as a writer, TV presenter, and TV documentaries director. Years later, she successfully started acting, winning several international awards for roles in productions like The Journey, Baghdad In My Shadow, or Baghdad Central on Channel 4 and Hulu. She also has written and directed I Dream, an experimental short film.
Zahra is one of the International Emerging Film Talents Association’s (IEFTA) Global Film Expression initiative winners in 2021. She is currently directing her first feature documentary film Women of My Life and finally in 2022 founded IQ.Docs in Iraq, an initiative that focuses on documentary film screening across the country and small workshops.
Yasmine Chouikh
Algerian filmmaker, producer and actress.
Founding member
She has been presenting a tv program on cinema on the national Algerian television since 2005. She has written the script of many short films and has directed two: El Bab in 2006 and El Djinn in 2010, and also a tv series studio 27, in 2015. In 2016, she directed her first feature film Jusqu’à la fin des temps.
Yasmine is the artistic director of the Festival International du Court-métrage de Taghit (Algeria) and the programmer of short films at the Festival International du Film Arabe d’Oran (Algeria).
Zoulikha Tahar
Algerian writer and director based in Paris.
Zoulikha directed several short films and won, in 2021, the audience and jury prize for best documentary at the Franco-Arab film festival in Noisy-le-Sec for her film Kol Youm.
Zoulikha is currently working on her first feature film A Window for Fifi wich was in residency at Groupe Ouest and Casell'arte. She is also in pre-production for an Arte web series, while co-writing another series for Algerian TV.
Rawane Nassif
Lebanese-Canadian filmmaker, author and anthropologist.
Born in Beirut in 1983, Rawane Nassif lived and worked in Lebanon, Canada, Honduras, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Spain and Qatar. Her anthropology research focuses mainly on the politics of space, indigenous lives, and visual identities, while her film work is characterized by a personal creative documentary approach where she films her intimate surroundings.
Her latest shorts Turtles are Always Home screened at the Berlinale and TIFF, Ode to loneliness premiered in Rotterdam, and Msaytbeh, the elevated place was part of a site-specific installation in Beirut. She is currently working on a series of short films and an exhibit related to grief.
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Randa Ali
Director and writer working between Los Angeles and Cairo.
Her last short Mango was selected in the official competition of the 46th Clermont-Ferrand Int'l Short Film Festival.
In 2021, She was awarded the ARRI Franz Weiser grant for her film Kingdom of Strangers. The film won the Jury awards at Toronto Arab Film Festival, Cairo Int'l Shorts Film Festival & Beirut Shorts.
Sara Ishaq
Her independent debut film Karama Has No Walls (2012) went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) and a BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award. She also directed The Mulberry House, which premiered at IDFA.
Sara is currently working on her (untitled) independent documentary film and her first Fiction Feature The Station, which was selected for L’Atelier de la Cinéfondation Festival de Cannes 2020.
Moreover, Sara Ishaq is the co-founder of Yemen-based film foundation Comra Academy and the coordinator of the International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk.
Yemeni-Scottish film director, producer and trainer.
With her own production company, Henia Production, she develops Tunisian author driven documentaries distinguished at Visions du Réel, IDFA, Cinémed...
In 2018, her breakout feature documentary, Railway Men, remained six weeks in Tunisian theaters. In 2021, she wrote, directed and produced her first fiction feature, Under the Fig Trees, which was presented at the Directors’ Fortnight (Cannes Film Festival 2022) and in about fourteenth festivals around the world.
Under The Fig Trees was selected to represent Tunisia at the 2023 Academy Awards.
Erige Sehiri
French /Tunisian director and producer.
Founding member
Kawthar Younis
Egyptian filmmaker who studied film directing at the High Cinema Institute in Cairo.
Founding member
In her time as an Assistant Director, she worked with various local and international directors including Yossry Nasrallah, Maurice Sweeney and Eric Barbier. Her most notable film, A Present from the Past, opened to wide critical acclaim in numerous national and international film festivals, and was the first of its kind to set a record for audience demand in Egyptian independent theatres.
Kawthar currently works as a producer on TV commercials, short films and scripted series (including the upcoming Netflix Original Abla Fahita series).
Lina Soualem
French/Palestinian/Algerian filmmaker and actress, born and based in Paris.
Founding member
After studying History and Political Science at La Sorbonne University, Lina worked as a programmer for the International Human Rights Film Festival in Buenos Aires.
Lina’s debut feature documentary Their Algeria premiered in Visions du Réel 2020, was released in French Theatres in 2021 and received several awards. Lina acted in three feature films directed by Hafsia Herzi, Hiam Abbass and Rayhana.
In 2020, she worked as a researcher and writing coordinator on the series OUSSEKINE (Disney+).
Her second feature length documentary, Bye Bye Tiberias premiered in 2023 at The 80th Venice International Film Festival and received several awards. It was chosen to represent Palestine at the Oscars 2024 and was nominated in the Best Documentary category at the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards.