Déserts: dir Faouzi Bensaïdi (2023)

A road buddy comedy with a twist or two, wry humour throughout, gorgeous camerawork, and an all-pervading good sense of humanity and absurdity. Two petty crooks, Mehdi and Hamid, drive around the villages of southern Morocco, trying to recover a backlog of loans for their agency that have not been repaid by villagers overwhelmed by poverty and drought. But then they meet a highwayman … In Arabic with English subtitles.

This film screens in the sixth edition of the Manarat’s CinemaMAS film festival, curated this time by filmmaker and visual artist Scandar Copti – head of the Film and New Media program at NYU Abu Dhabi from 2014 to 2017. Currently, he is still teaching filmmaking at NYUAD while working on an upcoming feature film.

Individual films on weekdays are AED 30 per head, weekends are AED 50 per day, and there’s an all-inclusive ticket at AED 150.