2022 Festival Awards & Honourable Mentions

We're pleased to offer the following awards, to be given during the 2022 Toronto Arab Film Festival. 

• Juthour Jury Award for Most Promising Filmmaker - "WARSHA" Dania Bdeir
• Qayqub Award for Best Canadian Short Film - "BROWN BREAD & APRICOTS" Serene Husni
• Yamama Audience Choice Award for Best Short Film - "GALB'ECHAOUF" Abdessamad El Montassir
  • Honourable Mention - "NIGHTFALL" Romeo de Melo Martins
• Nakheel Jury Award for Best Feature Film - "A SECOND LIFE" Aniss Lassoued
  • Honourable Mention - "ALGERIAN CHRONICLES" Zak Kedzi
    

Awards Design

This year’s trophy is designed by Habiba El-Sayed, an artist andante designer based in Toronto.

Habiba incorporated traditional motifs and more modern aesthetics landing “on traditional mashrabihya, which are Islamic privacy screens, using a wood finish and incorporating that with a more sleek look of mirror. In this case the mirror represents the way filmmakers are reflected in the works they create and the way they reflect the experiences of the world around them.”

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Jury Award for Best Feature Film

Mervat Aksoy

Chafic Tabbara is a Lebanese Film critic, who writes for many newspapers and magazines. He writes weekly for «Alakhbar» Newspaper in Lebanon and periodically in «Alsahafa» Magazine (Al Jazeera). Since 2013 he has attended and covered Arab and international film festivals. He is a jury member of the annual «Arab critic award for European films» and «Arab Critic awards for Arab films».

Dima Toukan has over 20 years experience in the audio visual industry and is an award-winning creative producer. She has worked with a number of prominent TV networks, film production companies and media startups in the Middle East region. She currently works on projects in the capacity of creative consultant alongside developing content and film production. She is passionate about supporting aspiring filmmakers in realizing their unique and original stories.

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Jury Award for Most Promising Filmmaker

Robert Abboud is an Audio-Visual Director (Film, TV, Immersive Experiences) with a demonstrated history of working in the media and entertainment industry for over a decade, including 4+ years in creative interactive education. He directed the highly acclaimed one-take film “A Cold Morning in November”, which was screened at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and awarded with the two best fiction awards from the Franco Arab Film Festival in Paris. Created visuals for VIPs like the Pope’s visit to Jordan, WEF, Doctors Without Borders, The Doctors TV Show - CBS, Al Jazeera America and UNIFOR Canada.​

Nashwa Lina Khan is a community educator, facilitator, and researcher. She is also a writer and poet and occasionally dabbles in installation and archive that uses narrative methodologies. She holds a Masters of Environmental Studies from York University with areas of concentration focused on narrative methodologies, community and public health, refugee, and forced migration studies and is currently a PhD student at York University in Environment and Urban Change. Her work has been published in a variety of places including Vice, Rewire, This Magazine, and The New York Times. She is the host and producer of two podcasts, Muslim Rumspringa and Habibti Please.

Kelly Lui is the Distribution Coordinator at Ouat Media, a Toronto-based distribution and sales company that specializes in short film. Recognized internationally as one of the world’s primary destinations for work by the industry’s rising stars, Ouat Media boasts an award-winning catalogue of titles featuring 12 Oscar® nominees including 3 Oscar® winners to date.  

Kelly's experience also includes festival programming, community arts facilitation, and multimedia art making. She has worked with Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto Youth Shorts Film Festival and is a co-founder of The Asian Canadian Living Archive (TACLA) collective.

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Award for Best Canadian Short Film

Yasmeen Nematt Alla (she/her) is an Egyptian immigrant and settler living in Tkaronto, Turtle Island (colonially known as Toronto, Ontario). She has a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo and is an MFA candidate and a Gilbert Fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Arts. She has most recently exhibited at the Bronx River Art Centre in Bronx NY, Heaven Gallery in Chicago IL, and Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto ON. She has previously been an artist resident in the Banff Centre, ACRE, STEPs Public Art, UKAI Projects, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, and is currently an artist resident at Ferment AI and HXOUSE Creative Think Tank. As an artist worker, she supports art organizations in creating accessible and anti-racist modes of communications in their day-to-day operations.

Nahed Mansour is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist, curator, programmer, and arts-administrator. She currently serves as the Curator of  Programs and Education at the Gardiner Museum and.has previously held curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, South Asian Visual Art Centre, and Mayworks Festival. She holds an MFA in Open Media from Concordia University and a BA joint Honours in Semiotics and Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.

Toleen Touq is a curator, cultural producer and facilitator working between Toronto, Canada and Amman, Jordan. In Amman, she is co-founding director of Spring Sessions (2014-ongoing), a yearly residency program that brings together artists, researchers and cultural practitioners in a collaborative and experiential learning environment that is fueled by responsiveness to place and deep curiosity. She co-initiated and co-curated The River Has Two Banks (2012-2017), a multi-disciplinary artistic platform that addressed the historical, political and spatial relations between Jordan and Palestine. In Toronto, she is artistic director of SAVAC, a nomadic artist-run center dedicated to presenting and developing the work of marginalized artists on Turtle Island. In 2022, together with Liz Ikiriko, she initiated Ways of Attuning, a curatorial study group centered around nurturing generosity, collaboration, and imaginative thinking in curatorial practice. Her writings have been published with Sternberg Press, Ibraaz, A Prior, Manifesta Journal and others.

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Audience Choice Award for Best Short Film