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World premiere of Kyrgyz short "The seventh month" will be at the Red Sea IFF
The Red Sea International Film Festival Reveals International Shorts For 2025 Edition
Dates: 04-13.12.2025
Five World Premieres and Majority Female Directors Among 11 International Short Films Selected.
Narrowing down a record number of submissions this year, the Red Sea International Film Festival (Red Sea IFF) has selected 11 international short films for its Red Sea Shorts Competition strand. With six female directors – another benchmark for this strand – and five world premieres, the films hail from across the qualifying territories of Asia and Africa and countries including South Africa, Malaysia, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kyrgyzstan, Chad, India, Georgia, Kenya and, for the first time, Myanmar.
The shorts will be screened at the fifth edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival, which will run from 4–13 December 2025 in the historic district of Al Balad, Jeddah.
The 11 selected projects tackle a wide range of themes in the short film format, including emigration, mental illness, alienation, and a historical reckoning; spanning scripted, documentary and hybrid storytelling. The selected projects will be judged as part of the Yusr Awards, with the winners presented at the Festival’s awards ceremony.
Red Sea IFF received a record overall number of submissions for 2025 across all categories, including over 840 international short films submitted from Asia and Africa – with a particular increase from East and South-East Asia following 2024’s opening of submissions from that region.
THE SEVENTH MONTH
Country: Kyrgyzstan
Year: 2025
Director & script-writer: Aizada Bekbalaeva
Producer: Nazgul Doolotkeldieva
In a society where motherhood is still seen as a woman’s ultimate purpose, Mira hides the truth about a life-saving operation that left her unable to conceive. Wearing a fake belly while a surrogate carries her unborn child, she struggles to shield her family from judgment. As the ‘birth’ nears, the facade cracks. Courageous and delicately crafted, The Seventh Month explores love, survival and the clash between tradition and today’s realities with striking restraint.
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