Amber
2021 · 10m · AE
Directed by Faisal Hashmi
Genres: thriller
Tones: contemplative, tense
A barber at a remote highway barbershop is caught in a deadly situation when his first customer of the day reveals he isn't who he seems — a wordless Hitchcockian thriller.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A wordless barber thriller from Dubai — the setting does something to the Hitchcock formula that an American film would never think to do, and the silence isn't a stylistic choice, it's the entire engine.
A filmmaker from Dubai building a pure-cinema Hitchcock exercise in silence — no dialogue, no exposition, just a barber's chair and mounting dread.
Hashmi attempts a wordless Hitchcockian thriller in a UAE highway barbershop — ambitious for the form, but the execution is more proof-of-concept than achievement. The feature-in-development framing tells.
Festivals
- Al Ain Film Festival 2020, Best Film