Atlas Close-Ups
Today, I am 25 Years Old
Synopsis
Abidjan, 1978. Every day at 3:00 P.M., the train howls past. For 24-year-old Faten, a Lebanese exile and repressed artist, those seconds—closest to death—are the only ones that make her feel alive. She lives with Samir, a 27-year-old architect and photographer. Once inseparable, their bond has faded, their intimacy shadowed by loss. When a ceasefire is declared in Lebanon, Faten convinces Samir to drive to Beirut under the guise of a research trip. Packed into a small Renault 4, they cross West Africa—stopping at diaspora homes and post offices to gather news from families still under the falling bombs. What begins in laughter becomes a descent through fever, sandstorms, and silence. In the Algerian desert, trapped between life and death, Faten and Samir rediscover tenderness. Rescued and smuggled into Morocco, Faten redefines love: not passion, but endurance—the fragile pact to hold each other when the world collapses.
1991 Productions (United Kingdom)
Chloé Montana Rash, Anna Khazaradze & Nino Chichua
Director’s statement
My aunt’s diaries from 1978—when she went on a drive from Abidjan to Beirut through the ruins of postcolonial Africa—revealed to me that a woman in exile lives twice displaced: from her land, and from her own body. This “double exile” is at the heart of my film. This road from Abidjan to Beirut is both a journey toward freedom and a confrontation with illusion. I want to make a film where the intimate and the political are inseparable—where the female body becomes a political landscape, marked by desire, silence, and survival. Through Faten, I explore how women carry both personal and historical grief, and how love and exile mirror one another: both acts of distance, both acts of endurance. In reclaiming the road movie through a feminine gaze, I seek to invert its grammar—to make the road not a space of conquest, but a meditation on love, solitude, and tenderness.
Biographies
Shaden Safieddine Tazi is a Lebanese-Moroccan filmmaker based in Paris. A Columbia University graduate in film and media studies, she has worked as a teaching assistant, contributing writer for A Rabbit’s Foot, and story consultant on Algeria (2025), which was selected for the Telluride Film Festival. Her short Un jour tout va disparaître won the Best Cinematography prize at the Tangier Film Festival and screened internationally at venues including Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, the Arab Film and Media Institute, and Menart Fair. Tazi is currently editing her documentary I Haven’t Lived Anything.
1991 Productions was founded in 2017 with credits including Crossing (2024), which was selected for the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival; 9-Month Contract (2025), which was presented at CPH:DOX; Smiling Georgia (2023), which screened at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival; and Glory to the Queen (2020). Together with producer Chloé Montana Rash, who has worked on the development of acclaimed films including St. Vincent (2014), The Founder (2016), and Macbeth (2015), the company champions female-led, transatlantic projects rooted in the spirit of authorship and global collaboration.
October - November 2027 (Morocco)
May 2028
