Raneem Al Daoud

A hot summer's day in the Gaza Strip. Today the electricity is on. Christine’s beauty salon is heaving with female clients: a bride-to-be, a pregnant woman, a bitter divorcée, a devout woman and a pill-popping addict. But their day of leisure is disrupted when gunfire breaks out across the street. A gangland family has stolen the lion from Gaza’s only zoo, and Hamas has decided it’s time to settle old scores. Stuck in the salon, with the prospect of death drawing ever nearer, the women start to unravel. How will the day end? Will they lose their lives for the sake of “liberating the lion”?

A luxury hotel in a conflict zone. Development aid worker Dorothea begins an affair with a young drifter, Alec, but what starts as sweet distraction brings her dangerously close to losing control.

Fay lives in a cloistered apartment, which she can’t leave because her only obstacle to the outside world is her brother. She expresses all of her obsessions through painting, but when she orders a new paint palette, matters get complicated. Directed by Anas Ba-Tahaf and produced by Producer-Actor Hisham Fageeh, who also plays the protagonist along with Sofia Asir, Fay’s Palette is a robust film full of vitality, plunging us into an unspoken world that reveals, through a peculiar incident, familiar obsessions and repressed frustrations that we share with Fay.