Amman, March 30 — Tomorrow evening, Shoman Cinema invites audiences on a powerful cinematic journey across cultures, histories, and human emotions, with a special screening of six short films from around the world. The screening takes place on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation’s cinema hall in Jabal Amman.
The program opens with Two (1965) by legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, a delicate, visually rich story of a wealthy child trapped in a life of emptiness. Surrounded by expensive toys that bring him no joy, his world begins to shift when a simple, haunting melody drifts through his window. Outside, he notices a poor, free-spirited boy playing a wooden flute, a moment that ignites a quiet yet fierce emotional awakening and sets in motion a profound inner transformation.
From India to wartime Europe, the Yugoslav film The Silence (1972) by Predrag Golubović unfolds without a single word. Set during the winter of 1941, the film depicts an ambush against Nazi soldiers, using silence as its most powerful weapon to expose the erosion of human morality in the shadow of war.
The journey continues into the desert with the Sudanese classic The Rope (1984) by Ibrahim Shaddad. Two blind men and their donkey, bound together by a single rope, cross a harsh landscape during an Ottoman punitive campaign. Sparse yet deeply moving, the film reflects on human vulnerability, dependence, and the search for meaning in an indifferent world.
In The Uzbek Train (2001), director Veit Helmer turns an ordinary train station in Tashkent into a place of quiet revelation. As commuters rush to their destinations, a train driver becomes transfixed by a couple locked in an intimate embrace on the platform. The moment moves him so profoundly that he brings the train to a halt, and, in doing so, alters the course of his own life.
The Filipino film Shadows (2000) by Raymond Red immerses viewers in the restless pulse of Manila. Following a struggling photographer over the course of one difficult day, the film traces a series of tense encounters that mirror the city’s weight, noise, and quiet cruelty, revealing how urban life presses relentlessly on the individual.
The evening concludes with the Canadian film The Plant (1983), directed by Joyce Borenstein and Thomas Vamos. What begins as a gentle, almost whimsical story, a man bringing a mysterious plant into his home, slowly transforms into something darker. As the plant responds eerily to music and grows under his care, fascination turns to unease, and the boundaries between nurture and obsession begin to blur.