The 79th Venice Film Festival has announced the selection of the film of the Iraqi filmmaker Ahmed Yassin Al Daradji's Hanging Gardens to be screened at the festival’s Horizons Extra category. The Venice Film Festival is scheduled to run from August 31 to September 10, 2022.
The storyline of Hanging Gardens follows Assad, a 12-year-old rubbish picker, who crosses into a perilous red zone, finding himself caught in the crossfire between abusive forces of commercialism and fundamentalism in a world where defenders of humanism have lost their power. He embraces the courage it takes to not just survive, but live.
Hanging Gardens will be distributed in the Arab world by Film Clinic Indie Distribution, which was established by scriptwriter and producer Mohamed Hefzy, who also co-produced the film with Huda Al Kadhimi, Margaret Glover, and May Odeh. The film has a star-studded cast including Wissam Diyaa, Jawad Al Shakarji, Hussain Muhammad Jalil, and Akram Mazen Ali
The film project of Hanging Gardens by Ahmed Yassin Al Daradji, received the Final Cut award in post-production, an initiative at Venice festival designed to support films from Africa and the Middle East. Furthermore, it won the Mercury award during its participation at CineGounaSpringBoard in 2021.