The Station
Fall Grants 2022 - Production Stage
Sara Ishaq / Feature Narrative / Yemen, Jordan, Netherlands, France, Qatar / Original Language: Arabic / Interests: Drama
Synopsis
Layal runs a women-only petrol station in a gender-segregated, war-torn village in Yemen. It’s the inherited home in which Layal shields her 12-year-old brother Laith from recruitment and the war raging outside the station’s gates. Prepubescent Laith, however, is growing eager to escape the suffocating and emasculating walls of this women-only world. Today, Layal’s estranged older sister Zainab arrives and poses a threat to Layal’s home and fuels Laith’s desire to become a man in the ‘real world’. Challenged by the demands of impatient women customers and Laith’s ever-growing eagerness to leave the station, the relationship between the three siblings reaches a breaking point.
Credits
- Director
- Sara Ishaq
- Screenwriter
- Sara Ishaq, Nadia Eliewat
- Producer
- Nadia Eliewat
- Production Company
- Screen Project
About the Director
Sara Ishaq is a Yemeni-Scottish filmmaker who received an Oscar and BAFTA nominations for her short documentary, 'Karama Has No Walls' (2012), while she was studying for an MFA in Film Directing at the Edinburgh College of Art (2011). Her second award-winning documentary feature, 'The Mulberry House' (2013) premiered at (IDFA) and was released both theatrically and aired on Al Jazeera English. Sara is developing her first fiction feature, 'The Station', which was presented at the L’Atelier at the Cannes Film Festival in 2020. Sara is the co-founder of Comra Academy, a Yemen-based film foundation for creative film training, from which some of Yemen's most exciting new film talent has emerged since 2017. In 2022, Sara joined the International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk in Amsterdam as coordinator, an organisation founded by the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam, International Festival of Rotterdam and European Film Academy in 2020.