QUICK SELECT
YALLAH! NEW ARAB CINEMA
PRESENTED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ARAB FILM FESTIVAL AUSTRALIA
No cinema is more timely and needs to be explored as that from the Arab world. Whilst film production is just emerging (or re-emerging) in countries like Iraq and Jordan, there is a rich art cinema tradition in Arab North Africa and the diverse, vibrant and long-standing popular cinema of Egypt. And it’s not just a cinema of social problems and hard-hitting political statement. Arab movies can be sexy thrillers, light-hearted comedy, bubbly musicals or funky shorts. Throw yourself head first into the contemporary Arab experience with three features and selected shorts from the Arab Film Festival Australia»
EYE OF THE SUN
(Ein Shams) Dir: Ibrahim El Batout, Egypt/Morocco, 2008, 90 min, 35mm (unclassified 18+)
Once the site of ancient Heliopolis and a sacred location for Coptic Christians, Ein Shams now it has become a Cairo slum from whom few break-out. One of its children dreams of life in downtown Cairo. But her beleaguered taxi driver father has no time to indulge his daughter. El-Batout’s poignant tale journeys through the inequalities, lost ideals and marginal communities of modern day Cairo. Plus Huriyya And Her Sisters (2009, 8’, video), animation created by young Muslim women and girls at workshops in western Sydney.
BEIRUT OPEN CITY
(Doukhan Bila Nar) Dir: Samir Habchi, Lebanon, 2008, 100 min
Syrian-occupied Beirut in the 1990s: an Egyptian photojournalist tries to makes a documentary about political torture. Across town, a young Lebanese man is shot dead by the US Ambassador’s bodyguards. The two stories come together in the bomb-chiselled mean streets of Beirut and its endlessly changing national, factional and personal alliances. Habchi’s film has the blood of the best political thrillers of the 1960s and 70s in its veins. Plus young Palestine boys make a movie in A Boy A Wall A Donkey (Dir: Hany Abu Assad, Palestine, 2008, 4’)
CAPTAIN ABU RAED
Dir: Amin Matalqa, Jordan, 2007, 95 min, 35mm (unclassified 18+)
Abu Raed is a cleaner working at Amman’s airport. But the poor kids in his neighbourhood think he’s a retired sea captain. Out of loneliness he plays along, but as he gets involved in the lives of the children he recognises their desperate curiosity about the outside world. Winner of the Audience Award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, the first feature film made in Jordan in many decades is a crowd-pleaser, but also a hard-hitter about life in a modern Arab city. Plus an Iraqi bus ride in Personal Calender (Dir: Basheer Almajid, Iraq, 2008, 9 mins)
