The Alleys

The film takes place in a neighbourhood of East Amman where the streets are narrow and everybody knows everybody. Ali and Lana are keeping their relationship secret. When a blackmailer sends Lana’s mother Aseel a video of the two of them, she goes to Abbas, the local strongman, to protect her daughter. What follows is everyone squeezing everyone else inside an order held together by gossip and violence. The film uses the pressure of the neighbourhood not as background but as the engine of the story, and it does not pass over the question of whom the decisions taken in the name of honour actually protect. Bassel Ghandour’s hundred and sixteen minute Jordanian film was completed in 2021.