It's rare that award-winning films in the region come from outsiders. But when short film Karayr took top prize at the inaugural HollyShorts Dubai festival in December, it did so without the scale of studio backing or institutional funding that typically defines the region’s most visible releases. Instead, its momentum was built through persistence, community support and a belief in a story that challenged conventions.
Karayr was created by Nechteh Apelian, a Lebanese-Armenian filmmaker, and Razan Takash, a Jordanian writer, producer and director. The duo began developing the story in 2017, working through script drafts long before the film’s completion. The project, which imagines a world where civilisation has collapsed and humanity has regressed into cave-dwelling societies, sits within a growing but still loosely defined creative movement often referred to as Arab futurism.
Futurism, speculative fiction and post-collapse storytelling, has historically been more closely associated with western media than Middle Eastern cinema. In Karayr, those frameworks are interpreted through a regional lens, shaped by questions about conflict, cultural fragmentation, shared humanity and cycles of power.
The premise is built on duality: a man with retained intelligence surviving in a world where cognition has largely disappeared, and a second character living like an early human ancestor. The dynamic between them becomes the film’s focus, exploring whether human behaviour evolves through empathy or through the influence of power and survival instinct.
Shot in Jordan, the film follows an ex-military officer, living in isolation in a cave. The area around him was once Armenian territory, leaving behind cultural artefacts and music that he cannot linguistically interpret.
The music itself is composed partly by Arto Tuncboyaciyan, whose avant-garde folk work has intersected with major international acts including Armenian-American heavy metal band System of a Down. Other diegetic pieces in the film draw inspiration from the work of Komitas, an Armenian priest and composer, whose music forms a foundation for hymns in the Armenian Orthodox church.
These influences are not decorative, Apelian explains, but intentional cultural layers that speak to the emotional core of the film.
“The story asks whether conflict exposes something primal in all of us,” Apelian explains. “We wanted to put a modern man and a caveman-like man in a shared space and observe what unites them, and what tears them apart.”
Takash adds that the idea was born from the region itself, not from post-apocalyptic tropes.
“For many in our generation, the instinct was to look forward and examine consequences instead of explaining everything through the past. You can’t change the past, but you can shape the future,” Takash says.
The production reflected that philosophy. Lacking major regional online crowdfunding infrastructure, the filmmakers raised funds in person, pitching the project directly to attendees at conventions including Comic-Con. The financing target was reached within three months, but that was only the beginning.
A turning point for the short film was getting actor Jihad Abdo attached to the project during the Sag-Aftra actors’ strike. The filmmakers reached out to Abdo through Instagram, drawing on a shared cultural familiarity. Apelian and Takash both knew his work from Syrian television, long before he left for the US and began working in Hollywood productions.
“Until Jihad joined, all we had was the crowdfunding money,” Takash said. “When he read the script and said yes, it flipped everything. People recognised his name, and suddenly the project felt possible in a different way.”
The eight-year journey culminated in Karayr's official selection at HollyShorts Dubai. “The reception was more than we imagined, with a screening room full of people reacting and praising the film. Then on awards night, the film won the coveted Grand Prix Award ‘Best of Fest’, which means the film goes on to compete at the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts in LA in August,” Takash says.
“We still can’t believe it. Karayr is going to Hollywood! It’s a life-changing moment that only fuels our passion for a different kind of filmmaking that surely has a future.”
The filmmakers have also teased that a feature film version of the 17-minute short is in the works, confirming that a 24-page feature treatment already exists, structured in parallel timelines.
“We want to go proper for the feature,” Takash said. “Sustainable, co-produced, developed through labs, not through sheer luck and survival.”
The wider significance, however, is not about Hollywood validation alone. It is about opening a new grammar for Middle Eastern genre filmmaking, one that sees speculative futures not as imported templates, but as stories that can originate from the region itself.
