Red Sea Competition Film ‘Sink’ Debuts Trailer

Jordanian filmmaker Zain Duraie arrives at this year’s Red Sea Film Festival with her first feature “Sink” (“Gharaq”), a deeply personal drama screening in competition. The film, which traces a mother’s increasing desperation as her teenage son slips into mental illness, marks a bold step for a director intent on reshaping expectations around Arab cinema. Duraie previously gained international attention with her short “Give Up the Ghost,” which premiered in Venice’s 2019 Horizons Shorts Competition and went on to win multiple festival awards.

Variety is exclusively premiering the first trailer (below) for “Sink,” which follows Nadia (Clara Khoury), a mother convinced she can guide her teenage son, Basil (Mohammad Nizir), back on track after he’s suspended from school for a troubling outburst. But as his mental state steadily deteriorates, she overlooks the warning signs, sinking deeper into denial as disaster approaches.

Speaking with Variety ahead of the Red Sea Film Festival, Duraie shares that the story comes from a private place she prefers not to detail, though its emotional roots run deep. “It’s very personal, but I’m protecting the privacy of the person,” she explains. What she will acknowledge is the frustration that propelled her forward: “I noticed that nobody in the Arab world ever talked about this topic openly because everybody’s chasing the trendy subjects or the boxes Western festivals want checked. I wanted to do something different, something close to home, from my heart, something very personal.”

“Sink” focuses on schizoaffective disorder and how it quietly upends the life of a seemingly stable, upper-middle-class family. While the subject is striking, Duraie emphasizes that the film is, at its core, about a mother’s love. That mother, played with deft subtlety by acclaimed Palestinian actress Clara Khoury, anchors the film’s emotional stakes. “People say my film is about mental health, but I think it’s an ode to motherhood,” Duraie notes, “a gift to motherhood.”

That nuanced domestic world was precisely what some Western funders rejected. “They told me it wasn’t ‘Jordanian enough,’ and I didn’t know what that meant,” she recalls. The implication, she felt, was clear: they expected poverty, overt social collapse, or an explicit institutional critique rather than a character-driven psychological drama set within a modern home. “It’s shot in my city. My crew and cast were from Jordan and Palestine, and everyone was fully dedicated to making this film happen.” she says. “Maybe they wanted the collapsing psychiatric system. That’s a film for another day, but not where my heart is.”

Instead of reworking the film to fit those expectations, she and producer Alaa Alasad (Tabi360) turned toward regional co-production, securing financing from Arab partners who trusted the project as it was. “Nobody commented. Everybody gave me those funds with full confidence,” Duraie says. “They told me the power of the film is in its universality.” That independence shaped the tone of the shoot and edit, which she describes as a kind of creative freefall, made possible because “nobody was on top of us saying, ‘You have to do this or that.’” Support came from the Jordan Film Fund, Doha Film Institute, Red Sea Film Fund, and Lebanon’s Arab Fund for Arts and Culture.

Visually, “Sink” is defined by water, a motif Duraie has long been drawn to and one that mirrors the mother’s internal state. The Arabic title can mean both “drowning” and “sinking,” and the pool becomes a symbolic space where the characters float, drift, and disappear beneath the surface. “I wanted to use that pool as a device in the film, her pool of denial,” she explains. “It’s him floating in that water around her and she’s not seeing that he’s actually sinking.”

Working with cinematographer Farouk Laaridh, she crafted a fluid aesthetic that peaks in the film’s central pool sequence — what the team called “the disaster sequence.” It begins in calm waters before slowly tightening with increasing unease. Laaridh shot underwater for the first time, letting the camera drift around the actors. “We told him: move the camera like you feel she would be thinking,” Duraie says.

Silence, too, shapes the film. Duraie, who jokes she’s “terrified of dialogue,” built “Sink” on quiet emotional beats that mentors warned could easily fall flat. “But I wanted to play on silence as a tool for her denial,” she explains. “Sometimes I felt this could be a silent film and people would still understand it.” That restraint depended on her cast’s ability to convey emotion with minimal speech. Khoury and co-star Mohammad Nizar rise to the challenge. “It’s a risky role, and Clara took it on with so much courage,” Duraie reflects. She spent three years preparing with Nizar so he could fully inhabit the illness, guiding both actors toward the small gestures and interior shifts she views as “the real heart of cinema.”

Since premiering in Toronto’s Discovery section and screening at BFI London, “Sink” has drawn strong reviews and intensely emotional reactions. A woman living with mental illness approached Duraie after a screening to thank her “for making us look human.” Mothers have shared their struggles with their own children. “If this film is touching people, changing a life, that’s more important than an award,” she reflects.

Returning to Red Sea, where she first developed the project before being named an “Arab Star of Tomorrow” last year, feels especially meaningful. “It’s a full-circle moment,” she says. “I first harbored this project here. Now I’m back in competition. It’s not easy, so I’m honored — and nervous,” she adds with a laugh. With “Sink” now screening for an Arab audience for the first time, she admits she’s “scared of the reactions,” but also optimistic: “I am hoping they’re going to be touched.”

Looking ahead, Duraie plans to continue exploring complex women and, perhaps, mental health in subtler ways. “My next film will be even crazier and riskier,” she says. “If I’m not in my element, I’m going to make a bad movie.” With “Sink,” she’s found that element, emerging as one of the most distinctive new voices in Arab cinema.