Casting

Palestine
Producer: Rashid Abdelhamid
Production Company: Made in Palestine Project

Project Logline:

Casting tells the story of an odd-man-out film director casting actors for the last remaining scene of his feature film. Through a series of absurd urban vignettes featuring characters from his seaside city with a slum, the film writes the biography of a whole society, and explores the very dialectics of time, place, and identity. As life's monotony and lumbering banality make themselves felt, Casting takes the wide view to unveil its fleeting moments of hope.

Ahmad Abu Nasser and Mohammad Abu Nasser were born in Gaza in 1988, one year after the last cinemas in Gaza were closed. Longtime cinephiles, the identical twin brothers, who still live in Gaza. after 4 years of work in the film industry, in 2010, Arab and Tarzan won the “Young Artist of the Year Award” with their project Gazawood – a series of posters for fictional feature films named after Israeli Defence Force (IDF) military campaigns on Gaza – and their short film Colorful Journey, which played at London' Mosaic Room in March 2011. The Guardian then did a short video feature on them, which launched the twins into the international consciousness and led to an invitation to show their work in Austin, Texas in October 2011 – the first time they ever left Gaza. The maverick twins continue to enter the international consciousness, and in 2012 were featured in Al-Monitor's list of the 50 People Shaping the Culture of the Middle East.