Belle Mariano

A mom who loves K-dramas quits chemo, having lost hope. Her last wish is meeting her favorite K-drama star visiting Manila. Her four kids promise to help if she returns to treatment afterward. A mother, who loves watching K-dramas, decides to stop her chemo treatment after losing hope of getting better. Her only dream before dying is to meet her ultimate K-drama idol, who is visiting Manila for a series of events. Her four children agree to work together with the condition that once their mother meets their idol, she will undergo therapy before her time runs out.

Eid, a young man from Rahat, was sexually assaulted as a child and dreams of creating theater. When his parents arrange his marriage against his will, he fights for his freedom and dreams within Bedouin society. Eid is a young man from Rahat. He dreams of becoming a playwright and secretly writes a play based on the sexual assault he experienced as a child. He is in love with a married Arab actress who lives in Paris and helps him with his writing. When his parents inform him that they are arranging a marriage for him with a girl he's never met, he has no choice but to marry. When his wife asks him for a child, Eid makes an agreement with her - he will give her a child and in return, he will continue to have his freedom. Eid saves money and travels to Paris, but his lover does not show up. In his solitude, he writes an ending to his play and returns to Rahat. —Jerusalem Film Festival

After an encounter in the heart of the Rajasthan desert, the filmmaker recalled the images of a film made by Mani Kaul in 1973, titled "Duvidha". Who is this then, whose face has become part of the persistence of a cinematographic image? Loubna Régragui is above all a film preservationist who also makes films. One needs to put it like that to understand some of the energies that animate "The Nine Lakh Stars", which was the search for acceptable analogue elements of Mani Kaul's high-modernist masterpiece "Duvidha" (1973) whose soul, she thinks, was erased by its digital mastering. Which is an interesting question to ponder apropos of a film that tells the story of a ghost, who incarnates a young bride's absent husband... Is the digital ghost of the analogue? While Kaul passed away a decade ago, there are still some witnesses for Régragui to interview about "Duvidha"'s creation and the particularities of Kaul's art. This makes "The Nine Lakh Stars"s three things at once: a treatise on the ethics of preservation, a pars pro toto portrayal of a historical film giant and a meditation on the various meanings of a key work of world cinema. —Olaf Möller, Curator and Programmer of Cinema Regained for the film's World Premiere selection at IFFR 2022