Sharjah Film Platform Montage (SFP Montage) is a series of special projects and initiatives linked to annual film festival of the Sharjah Art Foundation. Featuring films from past editions of Sharjah Film Platform, SFP Montage forges new associations among the works and expands their reach beyond Sharjah. Focusing on locations in Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen and Palestine, this curated programme presents short films that explore personal and collective memory through gestures of care, grief and resistance. In Bar Saar, a donkey racetrack becomes a site of community and generational tension. Up Shot reflects on familial grief shaped by political exile, while The Grocery List, set in a surreal mini-mart, traces a young man’s quiet defiance against familial and societal expectations. And Then They Burn the Sea and Don’t Get Too Comfortable draw on personal and family archives to explore memory, absence and displacement. Together, these films offer an intimate yet wideranging view of belonging. Through actions that are tender, resistant and deeply rooted, the programme invites viewers to consider how film can preserve what is often left unspoken.
Up Shot
by Maha Haj
34 min
2024
After suffering unimaginable loss, Suleiman and Lubna retreat to an isolated farm, where they tend to their crops and engage in impassioned debates about their five children's life choices. One day a stranger arrives to reveal a harrowing truth from their past.
Maha Haj is a filmmaker with a diverse background in English and Arabic literature. A graduate of the esteemed Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she weaves her profound understanding of storytelling into each frame. Her artistic journey has been marked by notable collaborations, including her work as a set designer on renowned productions such as The Attack by Ziad Douairi and Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains and It Must Be Heaven. Haj's directorial debut came in 2009 with the short film Oranges — which won an Audience Award at the Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival — followed by the poignant documentary Behind These Walls in 2010. Her first foray into feature filmmaking came in 2016 with Personal Affairs, a critically acclaimed work that was selected for Cannes' prestigious Un Certain Regard in the 2016 edition of the Cannes Film Festival and won the Archie Award for Best First Feature at Philadelphia Film Festival and the Critics’ Award at Montpellier. Her last film, Mediterranean Fever, also premiered at the 75th Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard, where it won Best Screenplay, before going on an extended festival tour that included the likes of the Rotterdam, Palm Springs, Chicago, Vancouver and Melbourne international film festivals. Moreover, it won the Student Jury Prize at Tokyo FILMex and a Golden Firebird for Young Cinema at the Hong Kong Film Festival.
And Then They Burn the Sea
by Majid Al-Remaihi
12 min
2021
And Then They Burn the Sea is an elegiac contemplation on familial memory and loss. Filmmaker Majid Al-Remaihi ruminates on the experience of witnessing his mother’s gradual and terminal memory loss over the course of many years. Weaving a personal family archive, reenacted dreams and rituals, the film underlines the promise of cinema as a medium for memories even at their most irretrievable.
Majid Al-Remaihi is an award-winning artist and filmmaker from Doha, Qatar. His short film And Then They Burn the Sea was Qatar’s first at Locarno in 2021, and went on to win Best Short in Vienna Shorts. He’s currently enrolled at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains. He is also part of the Film Programming team at the Doha Film Institute.
The Grocery List
by Taqwa Ali Naser
17 min
2024
In a minimarket, young Jehad faces a choice between societal expectations and his desires as he shops with his mother.
Taqwa Ali Naser is a Bahraini Filmmaker and scriptwriter with a BA in Cinematic Arts from Malaysia in 2019 and 9 films to her credit. SInce 2016, Taqwa has played different roles in her films but she has found herself in screenwriting and directing. She has made different films (narrative, music videos, experimental, and documentaries) in the Arabic, English, and Malay languages. Besides her films, Taqwa has written a Mini-series called Al-hanaya, has participated in developing the mini-series The Crow Nest (2022) and has written the docudrama feature A Palm Tree in Muttrah under the supervision of Sultan Qaboos University. Her films travel around the festivals, and she won myriad prizes for her short films Wings of the Dawn, The Shoes That Get Smaller Every Night, and most recently Scapegoat, for which she wrote the script. Furthermore, she directed a short film for the National TV of Bahrain called The Lost Person Never Stops Searching in 2023.
Don’t Get Too Comfortable
by Shaima Al Tamimi
9 min
2021
An introspective letter to the director’s deceased grandfather, the film questions the continuous pattern of movement amongst Yemenis in diaspora. Using archival photographs, sourced footage and animation, it calls attention to the collective feeling of statelessness shared by migrants.
Shaima Al-Tamimi is a Yemeni-East African photographer and filmmaker based in Qatar. Her work is inspired by social issues reflective of her lived experiences, drawing on themes of migration, healing and sociocultural issues within her environment. In 2022, Shaima was commissioned by Qatar Museums to document the current Flour Mill Factory before it is demolished to make way for the new Art Mill 2030 museum. This was Shaima’s first major commission as a photographer and she delivered two bodies of work that capture the universality of flour and questions its migratorial identity. In 2021 her short film Don't get too comfortable premiered at the Venice Film Festival and has continued to be showcased at over 50 film festivals including in museums exhibitions and at art galleries around the world.
Bar Saar
By Mohammed Jassim
30 min
2023
‘Do you like donkeys?’ asks Abu Ahmed, referee of Bar Saar, a popular racetrack in Bahrain where donkeys pulling carts and their drivers compete against each other. This documentary explores the life of a small Bahraini community through the eyes of Abu Ahmed and his son, following their journey into the fascinating local pastime of donkey racing.
Mohamed Jasim is a Bahraini documentary filmmaker known for his authentic visual style. He draws inspiration from everyday life, focusing on local human-centred stories. Using a handheld camera approach, his films offer an intimate perspective while shedding light on overlooked aspects of Bahraini identity, culture, and community through honest and thoughtful storytelling.
Sharjah Art Foundation
Sharjah Art Foundation is an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art within the Emirate of Sharjah and the surrounding region, in dialogue with the international arts community. The Foundation advances an experimental and wide-ranging programmatic model that supports the production and presentation of contemporary art, preserves and celebrates the distinct culture of the region and encourages a shared understanding of the transformational role of art.
The Foundation’s core initiatives include the long-running Sharjah Biennial, featuring contemporary artists from around the world; the annual March Meeting, a convening of international arts professionals and artists; grants and residencies for artists, curators and cultural producers; ambitious and experimental commissions and a range of travelling exhibitions and scholarly publications.
