‘PREMIÈRE : WARDI - Mats Grorud’

Present day Beirut, Lebanon. Wardi, an eleven-year-old Palestinian girl, lives with her family in the refugee camp where she was born. Sidi, her beloved great grandfather, was one of the first to settle there after being driven out of his village in 1948. The day Sidi gives her the key to his former house in Galilee, Wardi is afraid he has lost all hope of going back there one day. But how can each family member help this young girl to regain hope, each in their own way?
 
Mats Grorud is a Norwegian director and animator. He has already made two shorts and works as an animator on several feature-length films, documentaries and video clips. When he was a child, his mother worked as a nurse in refugee camps in Lebanon. In the 1990s, Mats was a student at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, and gave classes in English and animation in the Burj El Barajneh refugee camp. The screenplay for his first feature-length film, Wardi, is based on refugee accounts and his own experience.