SAF announces winners of Sharjah Film Platform 7 awards

This year, the films in the competition section were nominated by an international committee of filmmakers. The selection featured a wide range of films from different parts of the world, including Myanmar, Bhutan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Colombia, Bahrain and Palestine. 

The films featured in the festival were then evaluated by an international jury that selected the Sharjah Film Platform Award winners. The jury members included:

• Fadi Haddad, Associate Professor of Digital Production and Storytelling, American University in Dubai
• Katia Jarjoura, Filmmaker and Middle East specialist
• Sarah Trad, Co-Director of Programming for the MENA Film Festival in Vancouver
• Youssef Shazli, Cofounder and Director of Zawya Cinema
• Zeina Shanaah, Head of Development at Alamiya Filmed Entertainment
• Nezar Andary, Filmmaker, Academic and Curator

SFP Awardees:

• Best Documentary Feature Film: 
Coconut Head Generation (2023) 
Director: Alain Kassanda
France, Nigeria | 89 Minutes

Reclaiming the expression ‘coconut head generation’, a derisive term for stubborn and brainless youth, the film shows how a group of students assert their right to intellectual freedom, while honing their critical voice.  

• Best Documentary Short Film: 
Surveilling A Crime Scene (2024)
Director: Alana Hunt
Australia | 22 Minutes

Shot on Super 8mm film, the film examines the lives of non-Indigenous people in Miriwoong Country in northwest Australia to frame colonisation as not only a historical phenomenon but also a continuous and present violence. 

• Honourable Mention Documentary Feature Film: 
From Ground Zero (2024)
Supervisor: Rashid Masharawi
Palestine, United Arab Emirates | 113 Minutes

This hour-long feature, comprising 22 short films of various genres, explores everyday life through drama, comedy, literature, painting, music and animation. The films reflect the vitality of the art scene in the Gaza Strip, despite all odds.

• Best Fiction Feature Film: 
Cu Li Never Cries (2024)
Director: Phạm Ngọc Lân
Vietnam, Singapore, France, Philippines, Norway  | 92 Minutes

The film weaves together the present moment with the complex echoes of Vietnamese history by interspersing an old woman's longing for the past with a young couple's uncertain future.


• Best Fiction Short Film: 
Upshot (2024)
Director: Maha Haj
Palestine, Italy, France | 34 Minutes

After suffering unimaginable loss, Suleiman and Lubna retreat to an isolated farm,
where they tend to their crops and engage in impassioned debates about their five
children's life choices. One day a stranger arrives to reveal a harrowing truth from their past.

• Honourable Mention Fiction Feature Film: 
Oasis of Now (2023) 
Director: Chia Chee Sum
Malaysia, Singapore, France | 90 Minutes

In this film, a woman meets up with her daughter in a stairwell of an old Kuala Lumpur apartment complex. Taking refuge on a nearly abandoned floor, they play simple games and make the most of their secret time together before each must return to their home in the same complex. But in these stolen moments when dreams and reality elide, nothing is quite what it seems.

The seventh edition of Sharjah Film Platform took place from 15 to 24 November 2024 at the Mirage City Cinema, the open-air theatre in Sharjah’s historical quarter, and VOX Cinemas, City Centre Al Zahia.

Presented in parallel with the film screenings, a series of public programmes provided opportunities for learning and gathering. This year’s programme focused on notions of modernity in African and Asian film, cinema as resistance and resilience from Palestine and beyond, as well as innovations in documentary filmmaking.

Also part of this year’s SFP, the Sharjah Film Platform Feature Fund will award up to 500,000 AED to one UAE-based scriptwriter, director or lead/executive producer for the completion of an English- or Arabic-language narrative feature currently under production. Formerly the Pitching Forum, the strengthened fund now provides more comprehensive and robust support to filmmakers in the country. The deadline to submit the application is 11:59 pm (UAE time) on 28 February 2025. 

To know more about the Sharjah Film Platform 7, visit sharjahart.org.