Dima Hamdan

Dima Hamdan is a journalist and filmmaker based in the Middle East. She spent 10 years working as a broadcast journalist with the BBC World Service. The stories she covered during that time inspired many of the ideas for her short films. Since 2007 she has directed five shorts. Her film Gaza-London won the Best Arab Short prize at the Jordan Film Festival of 2009, the audience prize at Cultureunplugged.com, and was screened in several festivals in the US and UK, including the Cambridge Film Festival of 2009.

Hothouse Project - The Kidnap

A Jordanian policeman goes on a hunt to find his pregnant wife, who’s been kidnapped one day before she’s due to give birth. The search leads him back to a dark secret he’s kept hidden for 20 years.

Hasan is a senior police chief with the world at his feet. At work he’s a powerful man, and at home a proud husband to the young and beautiful Amal, who is expecting their first child. But his world is torn apart when Amal is kidnapped one day before she’s due to give birth. Hasan immediately discovers that the kidnappers are Ali and Huda; two petty scoundrels whom he took pity on and saved from a life of poverty and destitution. Ali and Huda never call to demand a ransom and Hasan soon realizes that this kidnap is related to a dark family secret. Ali and Huda are taking revenge for a crime that Hasan committed 20 years ago. If the secret is exposed, then Hasan’s reputation and career will be in jeopardy. But time is running out and there is no easy solution; he can either save himself, or his wife and baby.

Director's Statement

I studied law in a Jordanian university. In a lecture, a professor said that children born out of wedlock bear no legal rights towards the biological father because the law did not want to sanction “immoral behavior”.

Years later, I made an investigative series for the BBC on illegitimate children in the Arab world. During a trip to an orphanage in Amman, I met a 4-year old boy who didn’t have a nose. I was told that he was thrown in the garbage as a baby. By the time he was found, insects had eaten away at his nose. Most of the children in that orphanage were abandoned because they were illegitimate. The orphanage is the only household they will ever know. When they grow up, they will live in a society that doesn’t want to deal with them. Some will end up living a life of crime and prostitution.

But the child that didn’t have a nose stayed with me for days. I kept imagining the moment when he separated from his mother and thrown away. Who threw him away? What it his uncle? His grandfather? Was his mother killed after his birth? Is she still alive? And how can she carry on, knowing that her baby could be dead? What kind of man will he become? And why should he bear the burden of an act he did not commit?

The Kidnap comes from an angry place. Initially, I wanted to write the story from the perspective of the victims; the mother and the child. But then I became more curious about the men who impose their twisted interpretation of morality and ethics, and ultimately condemn children for crimes they did not commit. It would be very easy to portray such men as “villains”, but as I began to “create” Hasan I realized that he is a victim of the wider social and tribal structure that forces him to take actions that go against his own conscience.In a place where honor is defended with blood, even the strongest man can become a slave of his own society.