Projects in development
AMNESIA
Synopsis
A man awakes in the middle of a dark road with amnesia. Pleading with a group of men in front of a mosque to aid him, he pauses for prayer before retracing his steps around town and coming to an uncomfortable realization: he is an Israeli agent in Palestinian territory. While trying to escape, he kills a young man and is caught by the Palestinian police, who now have a difficult choice to make. If the agent is sent back to Tel Aviv, the murdered man’s family will never see justice for the death of their son. While they grapple with this dilemma, the agent must retrieve his memory, unraveling flashbacks that may help a mother discover why her son died some years ago, and why her life has been unbearable ever since.
Fresco Films (Palestine)
Tony Copti
tony@frescofilms.com
Jiries Copti
jiries@frescofilms.com
Laika Film Productions and Television AB (Sweden)
Andreas Rocksén
andreas@laikafilm.se
Director’s statement
Occupation is not just physical or geographical; it is also a mental and emotional state that is difficult to explain to anyone who has never experienced it. It means never having full agency in one’s own life, meaning decisions are constrained to a choice of the lesser of two evils, or merely weighing one evil against another. The ongoing catastrophe in Gaza is a testament to this brutal reality. Amnesia is not just about Eitan’s loss of memory, which is perhaps driven by an attempt to escape the guilt that haunts him; it mirrors the collective amnesia of a people who struggle to remember a time in their history when available choices may have brought hope rather than despair.
Biographies
Dima Hamdan is a journalist and filmmaker based in Berlin. Her latest short film, Blood Like Water, was shot with support from the Filmlab Palestine and had its premiere at the Academy Award-qualifying Galway Film Festival. A self-taught filmmaker, Hamdan has written and directed several short films since 2007. The Bomb (2019) was shot in Berlin with support from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenberg and had a successful festival tour, winning the Best Female Director Award at the Ayodhya Film Festival and honorable mentions at the Stockholm Independent Film Festival and the Naples Human Rights Film Festival.
Fresco Films is a production company with offices in Jaffa and Ramallah. It specialises in developing, financing, and producing feature films, having in mind a general audience for the project as well as its artistic value. Fresco also provides hands-on production services with finance structuring. Fresco founders Tony and Jiries Copti have produced, line-produced, and managed more than 30 productions, including the first feature film made in the Golan Heights, Syrian director Ameer Fakhreddin’s The Stranger (2022), which had its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. More recently, Fresco provided production services to Farah Nabulsi’s debut feature film, The Teacher (2023).
€653 810
€90000
Filmlab Palestine
October 2024, West Bank (Palestine)
March 2025
