SAFAR presents the UK premiere of Birdland.

On the hills of Tangier, in the midst of the forest, stands a decrepit ancestral home: La Mansouria. Lina lives there with her father Anis, her grandmother Amina, and the “good” Chinwiya, the young maid. Amina has gathered the family to organize a wedding, but her real motive is to convince the relatives to accept a very rich offer on the estate from a developer.

But Anis refuses to sell. He wants to donate his share of the property to create a perpetual sanctuary for the birds that he and Lina love. The tide turns on the family when a forest fire starts in hills... It’s raining birds on the forest.

“A fearless, unpredictable film, both realist and lyrical, with revolutionary undertones” - Cineuropa

Leila Kilani is a Moroccan and French filmmaker. She has been directing films since 2000. Interested in different narrative forms and storytelling, her work alternates between fiction, documentaries and video essays; with an experimentation of the intersecting of genres. Her work challenges the norms of narrative cinema and the cinematic vocabulary, in a perpetual search to shape a channel between the non-linear principles of Arab narrative with the linearity of Western storytelling. The constant questioning of the creative process, disrupts the narrative structure with a radical subjectivity.

Presented as part of SAFAR’s Spotlight on Morocco strand, showcasing a cinema not shying away from exploring queerness, classism and segregation.