Documentary About Sudan Wins Award at GFF

Photo showing all the participants in the Final Cut Venice 2023
workshop
Photo showing all the participants in the Final Cut Venice 2023 workshop
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Documentary About Sudan Wins Award at GFF

Photo showing all the participants in the Final Cut Venice 2023
workshop
Photo showing all the participants in the Final Cut Venice 2023 workshop

The documentary “Sudan, When Poems Fall Apart” has won the GFF Award at the Final Cut Venice 2023, an initiative aimed at supporting films in post-production phase. This year’s edition of the initiative saw the participation of seven works from the Middle East and North Africa.

El Gouna Film Festival (GFF) described the winning documentary as an “extraordinary” project. “The documentary draws a deep picture of Sudan by seamlessly narrating the stories of four women: Shajan, Marmal, Maha, and Rafida. The documentary is a sincere love poem about Sudan. It uses the overlapping stories of the four women to recreate the image of an ongoing revolution,” GFF said in a statement on Tuesday.

The documentary is a French-Tunisian co-production, directed by Hind Meddeb who has an impressive work record including films like “Paris, Stalingrad”, and “Tunisian Clash”, which shed lights on the reality of rappers in Tunisia after the fall of Ben Ali’s regime. In appreciation of the project, GFF offers a money prize of $5,000 to support the post-production stages.

“We are delighted to screen and support the extraordinary project ‘Sudan, When Poems Fall Apart’ at the Final Cut Venice 2023. This award emphasizes the festival’s commitment to the creative voices in the Arabic cinema, and to building sustainable connections in the Arabic cinema industry,” said Intishal al-Timimi, GFF director. He also congratulated the talented teams behind the film project “She Was not Alone”, scheduled to participate in the festival next month.

Young Sudanese actor, Mustafa Shehata, said El Gouna Film Festival shed lights on the Sudanese cinema and celebrates it. “This interest manifested in the participation of the film ‘You Die at Twenty’ in the 2019 edition, during which it won the Golden Award for Best Feature Film. That edition also screened the film ‘Talk About Trees’ by director Suhaib Qasim al-Bari, which also won the Best Documentary Film Award,” he told Asharq Al-Awsat.

Shehata, the lead actor in ‘You Will Die at Twenty’, said “the interest in Sudanese cinema in the upcoming edition of GFF means a lot to us in light of the war circumstances in our country,” especially since the Sudanese cinema had started to recover in the few past years. He also said ‘You Will Die at Twenty’ by director Amjad Abu al-Ala was a great comeback opportunity for the Sudanese cinema, along with ‘Tree Talk’ and ‘Offside Khartoum’ by Marwa Zein. This celebration from GFF reflects “the solidarity with the Sudanese cinema, which insists on surviving despite everything.”

The festival announced that the film project “She Was Not Alone” also won the GFF Award. It’s an Iraqi-Saudi-US co-production, directed by Hussein Al-Assadi, and produced by Ishtar Iraq Film Production. The film is a poetic contemplation of the life of a Bedouin woman named Fatima, who lives alone in the wetlands of Iraq with her beloved animals. The film explores the difficult choices that the character faces. It was selected to participate in the GFF post-production category, and compete for awards and grants provided by the festival and a number of influential partners in the film industry.



How Did a Jet Flip Upside Down on a Toronto Runway and Everyone Survive?

A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)
A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)
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How Did a Jet Flip Upside Down on a Toronto Runway and Everyone Survive?

A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)
A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)

Investigators are probing the causes of an unusual plane crash at Canada's largest airport on Monday, when a regional jet flipped upside down upon landing during windy weather, sending 21 of the 80 people on board to hospital.

Video shows the Delta Air Lines plane belly up and missing its right wing at Toronto's Pearson Airport, and of the crash that involved no fatalities, circulated widely on social media. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said on Tuesday that parts of the plane -- a Bombardier-made CRJ900 -- separated after impact and the fuselage came to rest slightly off the right side of the runway, upside down, facing the other direction.

The TSB said it is too early to know what happened and why. Here is what we know about this accident and similar crashes.

HOW DOES A PLANE LAND UPSIDE DOWN?

US aviation safety expert Anthony Brickhouse said aircraft are normally designed to land first on the two main landing gear, and then the nose gear. While the cause of the accident is unclear, the type of impact on the runway likely damaged the landing gear, leaving the plane imbalanced.

Brickhouse said that the plane ending up pointing in the opposite direction speaks to the amount of force and speed that led it to change direction.

"With all the forces and everything going on, if that wing is not there to support the aircraft it's going to go over," Brickhouse said. "It's not something that we see regularly, but when structures start failing, they can't do their job and the aircraft is going to react to the different forces on it."

HOW DID EVERYONE SURVIVE?

Passengers say they were hanging upside down in their seats after the crash.

"All of the passengers were wearing the safety belts. This prevented more serious injuries from occurring," said Mitchell Fox, director of the Asia Pacific Center for Aviation Safety.

Airplane seats are designed to withstand the force of 16 times the normal pull of gravity, or 16Gs, in a crash, whereas wings and fuselage are designed to handle 3-5Gs.

"In an impact-survivable crash, it's more important for the seats to hold up, giving passengers the best chance of survival," said Raj Ladani, a program manager for aerospace engineering at Australia's RMIT University. Good evacuation is key to air accident survivability, as witnessed last year when all 379 people escaped a burning Japan Airlines plane after a runway collision.

"The crew did a remarkable job of evacuating all of the passengers expeditiously," Fox said of the Delta crash.

HAS THIS HAPPENED BEFORE?

While rare, there have been cases of large jets flipping over on landing, including three accidents involving McDonnell Douglas' MD-11 model.

In 2009, a FedEx freighter turned over on landing in windy conditions on the runway at Tokyo's Narita airport, killing both pilots. The left wing was broken and separated from the fuselage attaching point and the airplane caught fire.

In 1999, a China Airlines flight inverted at Hong Kong while landing during a typhoon. The plane touched down hard, flipped over and caught fire, killing three of 315 occupants.

In 1997, another FedEx freighter flipped over at Newark in the United States, with no fatalities.

Brickhouse said it is too early to draw any conclusions from these earlier cases, especially as the MD-11 is a three-engine aircraft and the CRJ900 has two engines mounted toward the back of the aircraft, producing different flight dynamics.

HOW WILL THE INVESTIGATION PROCEED?

Unlike other investigations in which parts of the plane have gone missing, and there are mass fatalities, investigators will be able to interview all 76 passengers and four crew.

Investigators have access to the fuselage and wing, which are on the runway, and the black boxes -- the flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- have been sent for analysis.

"This is going to be a textbook investigation," Brickhouse said. "Some accidents, a lot of the pieces of the puzzle are missing. But right now looking at this accident, all the puzzle pieces are there. It's just you piecing them back together at this point."