Fiction, Director: Larissa Sansour, Palestine/Denmark/UK 2019, 28 min., Arab. with En. ST

In Vitro is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above. In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder, 70-year-old Dunia (Hiam Abbass) is lying on her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia (Maisa Abd Elhadi) comes to visit her. Alia is born underground as part of a comprehensive cloning program and has never seen the town she’s destined to rebuild.

Spotlight – Short Film Program I 68 min.
Science-fiction and disrupted Worlds
In these distinctive and unconventional short films from Lebanon, Palestine and Morocco, science-fiction offers the protagonists a way to escape their reality or the burden of the fate they carry. Yet even in these imagined worlds, escape is but an impossible dream.

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