• Jalal Maghout
cinema Fontevraud-l'Abbaye

Jalal Maghout/

Film director

Jalal Maghout is an animation film director from Syria. He started his film career in 2010 with "Creatures of Inexistence", which was his bachelor graduation project in Visual Communication at Damascus University.

He started his film career in 2010 with "Creatures of Inexistence", which was his bachelor graduation project in Visual Communication at Damascus University.

In 2013, his short film "Canvas on Mixed Media" was presented in Annecy and screened on ARTE. Soon after, he left Syria and headed to Berlin, where he started working on his first animadoc "Suleima", which premiered at DOK Leipzig 2014, and was the first Arabic entry selected for the short film competition at Annecy 2015.

His second animadoc "Up Here, with the White Gods" premiered at ITFS 2020. In the same year, he completed his Master's degree (with distinction) at Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf. His graduation film "Have a Nice Dog!" premiered at Filmfest Dresden and has since screened at numerous festivals and won multiple awards. Most notably, the film qualified for the 2020 Animation Short Film Oscar by winning the Grand Prix in Uppsala.

Residency project:

It’s a Short Animated Film for Young adults and adults named "The Heaviness of Absence"

Short synopsis : In the midst of war-torn Damascus, a young man tries to discover the fate of his arrested father, but his attempts will change his life forever.