Qatar’s Fashion Trust Arabia announces 2023 prize winners

Womenswear designer Amir Al-Kasm and Renaissance founder Cynthia Merhej were announced as the winners of the evening wear category. (Supplied)
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Updated 20 December 2023
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Qatar’s Fashion Trust Arabia announces 2023 prize winners

DUBAI: Qatar’s Fashion Trust Arabia announced seven winners of its annual prize on Monday.

While the star-studded awards ceremony was cancelled due to the “ongoing and deeply distressing humanitarian crisis in Palestine,” a two-day virtual deliberation session was held to find the winners.

Womenswear designer Amir Al-Kasm and Renaissance founder Cynthia Merhej were announced as the winners of the evening wear category.

The finalists were selected by a panel that included Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani and fashion writer Tania Fares, who founded the trust in 2018.

Other winners were Lebanon-based designer Ahmed Amer in the ready-to-wear category, British-Lebanese designer Katarina Tarazi in the jewelry category, and design duo of eyewear label A Better Feeling Omar Taha and Lily Max for accessories.

Menswear designer Adam Elyasse took home the Franca Sozzani Debut Talent award and Nigerian designer Adeju Thompson, founder of Lagos Space Programme, was awarded the Guest Country Award.


‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance

Updated 24 January 2026
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‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance

PARK CITY: As a million Syrians fled their country's devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.

In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.

For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.

The film is by directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes. (Supplied)

There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.

"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.

"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."

The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.

It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.

Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."

And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.

"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."