Every year, Carthage Pro reinvents itself, yet stays true to its core mission: supporting film projects, gestures, and perspectives. 2025 is no exception to this delicate balance between urgency and continuity. We welcome filmmakers amid uncertainty, in a challenging world and under difficult circumstances. It is in these very moments that cinema rises above itself, offering a space for intellect, invention, memory, and resistance. This edition places at its heart what we have always cherished: the singular voice. Not the standardized product, nor the item shaped for streaming platforms, but the artist confronting their film, their language, their country, their doubts, their story. This is Carthage Pro. Through Takmil, where almost completed films are refined, and Chabaka, where new projects take shape, we support African and Arab works that map their worlds with courage, precision, and poetry — films that ask what it means to live, love, resist, narrate, and remember. These films are not made to be consumed. They are made to be encountered. This year, Carthage Pro continues to be a meeting ground, bringing together producers, funds, distributors, and institutions around panels that foster dialogue, exchange, and listening. Projects are nurtured collectively, guided by both pragmatism and ambition, with a clear aim: for these films to exist, circulate, and reach audiences beyond borders. We believe in fostering South–South exchanges, collective wisdom, and the sharing of knowledge. This is why Carthage Lessons presents a masterclass, “Find your voice: The secret of storytellers,” by Ahmed Atef Dorra, inviting young filmmakers not to imitate, not to borrow, but to uncover and embrace their own voices. For the second year running, the VR/XR space anchors the Carthage Film Festival in the present, where new forms of storytelling explore reality in unexpected ways. What we celebrate here is not statistics, markets, or fleeting trends. We celebrate filmmakers who face the world squarely, with courage and curiosity. Carthage Pro is a space for creation, for exhibition, for occasional friction — but always for support. Through our workshops, roundtables, and encounters, we pursue a single ambition: for films to come to life, stories to be told, voices to be heard. In a world that too often invites silence, we choose the path of cinema. Welcome. Yamina Mechri Bendana
