The Red Sea International Film Festival announced the Egyptian film project Bullets & Bread by Mohammad Hammad as the winner of the Red Sea Lodge Award for an Arab Project, which is made up of $500,000.
The project is produced by Mohamed Hefzy (Film Clinic) and Kholoud Saad, marking their second collaboration with Hammad after his film, Withered Green, which won 28 local and international awards and was screened at more than 50 festivals around the globe.
In October 2019, Hammad’s film project Bullets & Bread got selected among twelve projects out of 120 submissions from 16 countries for the first edition of the Red Sea Lodge: Script & Feature Lab.
The selected projects joined a comprehensive program that includes three workshops, in collaboration with the Torino Film Lab, in Jedda. The workshops are led by international experts in the fields of directing, cinematography, sound, and editing.
Bullets & Bread was selected and announced as a winner of the award by a jury committee composed of Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah, producer Nadia Turincev, and producer and writer Meinolf Zurhorst.
The jury enjoyed the dynamic at the film’s heart which they described as “Soldier and Gypsy; Laurel and Hardy; Friendship and Adversity. We can’t wait to be part of this road trip, this cinematic voyage.”
Based on a story by Egyptian author Tamer Abdrab Elnaby, Bullets & Bread is about Youssef, a conscript serving his compulsory military service on the Egyptian eastern desert border who dreams of becoming a writer.
Awad, one of the characters, is a dangerous bandit from one of those tribes roaming that remote desert region who dreams of giving a better life for his family in Cairo. Their paths were not meant to cross but a true friendship will grow between them.