“I was shortlisted but I never imagined I would win,” says Hanan Youssef, the BBC Arabic Festival short documentary award winner. Her film, writes Ameera Fouad, was selected out of 200 nominations from 20 countries, after all. An account of Nubian women abandoned by their husbands following early marriages, The Town the Men Left features three narrators, Omay, Eyo and Sokar, each from a different Nubian village in Aswan, who despite the predicament of being “neither married nor divorced” managed to provide their children with an appropriate balance and the required resources. The film reveals this little known matriarchal society, with its crocodile pets and stunning nature, in a powerful way. There are six award categories in the BBC Arabic Festival, launched in 2014 as a platform for journalists, filmmakers and media professionals to tell unique stories. The documentary was Youssef's graduation project for a master's degree at Salford University, which she funded herself. In her acceptance speech Youssef explained how universities can shape personalities and how much her professors believed in her. “I would spend hours and days in the laboratory and the studio trying to watch, cut and edit, transcribe and do much of the paperwork in post-production files, then my supervisor would drop by to say, ‘I know all your hard work will definitely pay off.'”