2011 Production awards winners project descriptions:

Literature

Nesma Gweily
Egypt
Project: The book “About Egypt, That We Don’t Know”
A book which documents a trip along the Nile River, and Egypt’s coast and through the desert inside Egypt. The book unfolds over successive time periods, and expresses the relationship of Egyptians to the surrounding geography and its impact on their lives and history, up to the time of the revolution, which provided a different model for the Egyptian character.
Mona Marey
Lebanon
Project: The book “Memoirs of a Building”
An art book that brings together a collection of stories inspired by the building in which the author was born and raised. The stories are integrated with visual arts and the art of calligraphy, to make the spirit of the building visible to the reader.
Rana Zid
Palestine
Project:The book of poetry “Hesitant Angel”
A book including several prose poems in which the poet attempts to embody a separate entity that is completely isolated from the challenges and threats of the between Arab men and women.
Mazen Mustafa
Sudan
Project:
The book “The Boy From Rojas Died Before Knowing Me”
A long text which incorporates narrative philosophical dialogue, biography and poetry in the form of a letter to the Argentinian writer Ernesto Sabato.
Video

Mohamed Rashad
Egypt
Project: The development of a screenplay for the feature film “And Scheherazade Stopped Talking”
The film is a journey into the world of men and women, the different models used by each to express their desires, and the silence which leads to physical and moral death.
Shirin Abu Shaqra
Lebanon
Project: The development of a screenplay for the feature film “Fima Al Shidyaq”
The film revolves around the retrieval of the literature of Ahmed Fares Al Shidyaq, through the vehicle of two powerful and contradictory characters that combine a thirst for life with a critical imaginative view of the world.
Karen Mansour
Lebanon
Project: Producing the documentary film “The Matchmaker of Tahrir”
A story of Hagga Nahed, a khatba (matchmaker) from a popular Cairo neighborhood, who finds herself in the demonstrations of Midan Tahrir, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of marriageable candidates. As she tries to make matches, she is torn between existential issues and social change.
Theater

Abdallah Alkafry.
Syria
Project: The play “The Pain Threshold of Mrs. Ghada”
A contemporary play that addresses the period that preceded the political and social changes in Syria, by presenting the social aspects of human relations at the level of their interaction with the city and its emotional power. The play is an artistic approach to how social networking sites can overlap with artistic creativity as well as daily life.
Nancy Naus
Lebanon
Project: The performance “Zero Degree”
A dance performance project that revolves around the events which have recently occurred in the Arab world as shown through two dancers, the man who is sitting on the couch throughout the show, and the woman who looks like the TV reporter who forecasts the weather every night
Maryam Al Dredi
Tunisia
Project: The play “Live Transformations”
A play inspired by the popular folk tales “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Wolf and the Goat”. It demonstrates the range of individual transformations in the relationship between man and woman.
Visual arts:

Munira Qadeeri
Kuwait
Project:”Abu Azya”
A music video based on the visual reconstruction of a piece of the Iraqi saga. The project introduces a new perspective on the gradual decline of aesthetics in the Arab world, as a result of the invasion of western modernity, and the decline in the appreciation of the aesthetics of grief as well.
Mohamed Goha
Palestine
Project: The mural “Harvest for the January Season”
A work that illustrates the goals that the Arab revolutions seeks to achieve in the Arab street through recording facts as one mural with a sequence of events and details.
Wael Qudaih
Lebanon
Project: The multimedia work “Natural Center”
The project is about uncovering individual memories and sharing them with the outside world in order to give them a new life, by using the old cassette tapes of the artist’s family during the civil war in Lebanon.
Music:

Ramzi Abu Radwan
Palestine
Project: The Muwashshahat of the National Arabic Music Ensemble of Palestine
This project is to make the final audio edits to these muwashshahat and will seek to attain the copyright of the pieces and distribute them.
Kenan Ednawi
Syria
A project to record an album highlighting the oud, an extension of a musical experiment lasting for more than 2 years, and which has developed many techniques in order to make it close to the entire spectrum of listeners.
Fayrouz Karawya
Egypt
Project:The music video “Outside Myself”
A musical video based on representing new visual dimensions that can express the words and meanings of the song.
The 2011 jury committees:

Literature: Ali Badr (Iraq), Alaa El Deeb (Egypt) and Zuleikha Abu-Risha (Jordan).

Video: Mohamed Al Daradji (Iraq), Essam Zakaria (Egypt) and Hala Al Abdallah (Syria).

Music: Azza Madian (Egypt), Kinan Azmeh (Syria) and Simon Shaheen (Palestine).

Theatre: Essam Abu Khaled (Lebanon), Oussama Ghanam (Syria) Mohamed Hussein Habib (Iraq).

Visual arts: Bassam El Barouni (Egypt), Khaled Hourani (Palestine) and Fadi Al Yazji (syria).