A Ventriloquist walks into a bar and orders a stiff drink.
The Bartender asks: will that be all?
The Dummy answers: Does it look like I can speak with this hand up my ass?

As Egypt syncs further into poverty and is overwhelmed by debt, new cities are being erected across the country and prisons fill with dissenting opinions. But who are these cities for and what desire or ambivalence do they inspire -- and at what cost. Since it is currently not possible to safely speak about this: a ventriloquist, songs, and advertisements describe a seemingly bygone era of fascism.

Referencing Telefoni Bianchi films, a precursor to propaganda cinema under Mussolini, the legacy of building new capitals provides the material to express opinions and hope, through satire.

—Basma AlSharif

A sitting room amidst a white void. An elegant woman dressed in brown satin and lace. Sisi, his voice pitched down and distorted, dismisses the idea that his New Administrative Capital might never come to be. A ventriloquist tells jokes about fascism. A man calls, bringing the woman to orgasmic frenzy with the names of real estate. The relations, already strange and obscurely mediated, between the people and objects populating Basma al-Sharif’s Capital grow only more disorienting from here, as the film descends into a deranged whorl of new development: high rises, glimmering with the inhuman sheen of investment properties, seen from impossible angles; CGI visions of communities planned for perfect consumption; city and desert torqued into patterns of abstraction. Finally, all this collapses into a kind of music video, menacing and banal, for Nino Ferrer’s “Le Sud',' whose French lyrics are loosely and pointedly translated as karaoke-style subtitles. Unflinching in its pile-up of idiocies, al-Sharif’s film, a grim and exuberant satire, sketches the terms of a new anticapitalist realism. —Phil Coldiron

Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Arab Gulf. "A Stone’s Throw" trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.
—Razan AlSalah