DUBAI: Kicking off this year’s Horizons of Arab Cinema section at the ongoing Cairo Film Festival is an omnibus film called “Becoming,” which is a collaboration between Saudi female directors. Playing in an Out-of-Competition slot, directors Sara Mesfer, Fatima Al-Banawi, Jawaher Alamri, Hind Al-Fahhad and Noor Alameer worked together to direct a 70-minute fiction film featuring shorts that focus on the role and experience of women in society. According to the official synopsis of the film, it “explore(s) the human depth, under the pressure of suffering, secrets, anxiety and fear.” “The only theme that really united us here was womanhood,” Mesfer told Variety, after explaining that she chose to focus on the impact on a mother-daughter relationship when the daughter decides to have an abortion. “This short in ‘Becoming’ is about things that were going on around me. She cannot afford a doctor. She goes the traditional way to abort the baby using cinnamon. It’s an observation of a mother-daughter relationship,” she added. “Becoming” was made in 2020 over a six-month period, but was delayed being shown because of the pandemic, she said. “For ‘Becoming’ we all worked really independently. But for ‘Quareer,’ we had a much stronger collaboration,” she added of a separate omnibus project that is set to screen at the upcoming Red Sea International Film Festival.