Short Films

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Young Masters

THE DAMNED DON’T CRY
LES DAMNÉS NE PLEURENT PAS

• Director: Fyzal Boulifa
• FRANCE, BELGIUM, MOROCCO / 2022 / DCP / Colour / 111’ / Arabic, French; Turkish, English s.t.

• Screenplay: Fyzal Boulifa
• Director of Photography: Caroline Champetier
• Editing: François Quiqueré
• Music: Nadah El Shazly
• Cast: Abdellah El Hajjouji, Aicha Tebbae, Antoine Reinartz, Moustapha Mokafih, Walid Chaibi
• Producer: Gary Farkas, Clément Lepoutre, Olivier Muller, Karim Debbagh
• Production Co.: Vixens, Kasbah Films, Frakas Productions
• World Sales: Charades

2023 Belgrad Best Actress, FEDEORA Award

Fatima-Zahra and her teenage son Selim move from place to place, forever trying to outrun the latest scandal she’s caught up in. When Selim discovers the truth about their past, his mother vows to make a fresh start. In Tangier, new opportunities promise the legitimacy they each crave, but not without pushing the volatile mother-son relationship to the breaking point. The Damned Don’t Cry combines melodrama and neorealism to tell the story of a mother-son relationship on the fringes, observing the effects of oppression – both economic and affective – in a cut-throat world. Borrowing its title from a 1950s Joan Crawford melodrama, The Damned Don’t Cry employs non-professional actors for its two main actors and almost the entire cast. In his second feature which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, writer-director Fyzal Boulifa manages to avoid pastiche while ‘readily embracing some of the formal elements of melodrama’ as he takes his inspiration from Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and Le notti di Cabiria.

This film was a Meetings on the Bridge participant.