With her debut film The Present, British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi was shortlisted on Monday among the nominees for best live action short film in the 93rd Academy Awards, competing with Feeling Through, The Letter Room, Two Distant Strangers and White Eye.
The film won the Best Short Film award at the Jim Sheridan Short Film Competition, which was held for the first time as part of the seventh Dublin Arabic Film Festival in January. The film is written and directed by Nabulsi and is co-written by Hind Shoufani.
"On his wedding anniversary, Yusef and his young daughter set out in the West Bank to buy his wife a gift. Between soldiers, segregated roads and checkpoints, how easy would it be to go shopping?" reads the synopsis on IMDb.
The film stars Saleh Bakri, Mariam Kanj, and Mariam Basha.
The Present has won awards at several international festivals, including the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, the Brooklyn International Film Festival, the Arab Film Festival, the Aesthetica Short Film Festival, and the Manhattan Short Film Festival. It was also nominated for over 20 other awards.
Born in 1978, Nabulsi is a writer, producer and director. Prior to The Present, she wrote and produced three shorts, including Today They Took My Son, which premiered at the Edmonton International Film Festival.
Nabulsi's took part in previous shorts all focused on Palestine: Today They Took My Son, Oceans of Injustice, and Nightmare of Gaza.
The Man Who Sold His Skin, written and directed by fellow Arab filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania of Tunisia, is among the nominees for the best international feature film.
The nominations were announced from London by presenters Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra Jonas. The Academy Awards would typically have been held by now, but this year were postponed by two months due to the pandemic. They will instead be telecast on 25 April.
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