Maysaloun Hamoud

Maysaloun Hamoud (Arabic: ميسالون حمود; born 1982 in Budapest) is a Hungarian-born film director who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Her film Bar Bahar (In Between) won the NETPAC Award for World or International Asian Film Premiere at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. Maysaloun Hamoud was born in Budapest in 1982 to Israeli parents of Palestinian heritage. She grew up in Budapest and then Beersheba, Israel. She read Middle Eastern studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2004, introduced to cinema by an animator friend, she joined the Minshar School of Art in Tel-Aviv to study film. Hamoud became a teacher after her graduation. In 2010, Hamoud directed Sense of Morning, a short film inspired by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's Memory of Forgetfulness (1987). In the film, the poet strives to continue his daily routine of coffee and cigarettes on the last day of the siege of Beirut. At the Minshar School of Art, one of Hamoud's teachers was Shlomi Elkabetz, an Israeli film director. Hamoud developed her idea for the feature film Bar Bahar under his guidance and support. She has said that, according to him, her film is a sort of extension of Elkabetz's trilogy To Take a Wife (2004), Shiva (2007) and Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014).