DC PREMIERE Narrative
NEIGHBOURS
Dir. Mano Khalil | 124 min Switzerland, France | 2021 Kurdish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish w/ English subtitles Six-year-old Sero lives in a Kurdish community near the Syrian–Turkish border in the early 1980s. He is extremely fond of his neighbors, the last Jewish family in a village where Jews and Kurds once peacefully coexisted. When he begins Arabic school, Sero is inundated with the fiery nationalism of a new teacher who demands that Arabic replace Kurdish in the home, and propagates anti-Semitism to his impressionable charges. Neighbours draws from the director’s personal experiences, delicately balancing youthful nostalgia with themes of impending tyranny under the Assad regime.
Wednesday, May 18, 8:30 PM – Bethesda Row Cinema Saturday, May 21, 8:30 PM – AFI Silver Theatre 21
MID-ATLANTIC PREMIERE Documentary
THAT ORCHESTRA WITH THE BROKEN INSTRUMENTS Dir. Yuval Hameiri | 79 min Israel | 2021 Arabic, English, and Hebrew w/ English subtitles
An orchestra of 100 professional and amateur musicians, young and old, sets out on a journey against all odds to a one-time concert. They speak different languages. Their instruments are broken. One brilliant conductor, three gifted composers, and musicians from different backgrounds meet for four days of rehearsals to pull off a concert unlike any other: a concert played in Jerusalem on broken instruments. A poetic, engaging look at the broken and the whole through characters determined to create, if only for a moment, harmony in a discordant city. Thursday, May 19, 6:00 PM – Bethesda Row Cinema
