Farha is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives in a small village in Palestine in 1948. Girls her age are traditionally married off or spoken for, but Farha wants to continue her education, despite her village’s custom of restricting girls from attending school. Farha dreams of joining her best friend Farida, who spends weekends in the village but lives in the city where she attends school. Just when Farha’s father is finally convinced to allow Farha to go to school, a looming menace descends on the village. As violence escalates, Farha’s father conceals her in a small storage space to protect her, promising to return. Through a small hole in the wall and a few cracks in the wooden door, Farha witnesses events that change her life.

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About the filmmaker

Jordanian writer and director Darin J. Sallam holds an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the Red Sea Institute for Cinematic Arts (RSICA), affiliated with the University of Southern California (USC). To her credit are five award winning short films including Still Alive (2010), The Dark Outside (2012) and The Parrot (2016), all of which received multiple awards and screened in internationally acclaimed film festivals worldwide. A Berlinale Talent 2021, Sallam is the recipient of the 2015 Film Prize of the Robert Bosch Stiftung, the 2017 Artist in Residency Fellowship at La Cité Internationale des Arts and the 2018 Global Media Makers Fellowship by Film Independent. She has been a jury member on several international film festivals and is also co-founder and managing partner at TaleBox, a Jordanian production and training company based in Amman. Farha, which had its world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, is Sallam’s debut feature.

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