Annual Arab Film Festival Features Thought-Provoking, Groundbreaking Cinema
By Elaine Pasquini
[Najwa Najjar (l) discusses her film “Pomegranates and Myrrh” at the Arab Film Festival, and Ibrahim El-Batout accepts the Noor Award for best feature film for “Eye of the Sun.” (Staff photos P. Pasquini)]
THE 13TH ANNUAL Arab Film Festival held its opening night ceremony Oct. 15 at San Francisco’s Castro Theater. Master of Ceremonies Asaad Kelada inspired the audience, including several visiting filmmakers, with his encouraging comments. “Dreams can be realized if we believe in who we are, in our distinct voice and identity, and in the richness of our culture,” the acclaimed Hollywood-based director and producer averred. “Nothing can stop us from moving forward if we truly believe in our dreams.”
During its 10-day run, the festival screened 41 films from 22 countries in theaters in San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose and Los Angeles.
Following Kelada’s opening remarks, executive director Michel Shehadeh, along with the festival’s seven jurors, presented the Noor Awards for best films. Award-winners were Ibrahim El-Batout’s “Eye of the Sun” (Egypt, 2008, Feature Fiction, $2,000), Jean Marie Offenbacher’s “Tea on the Axis of Evil” (Syria, 2009, Feature Documentary, $2,000), Ahmad Habash’s “Fatenah” (Palestine, 2009, Short Fiction, $500), Laila El-Haddad and Saeed Taji’s Farouky’s “Tunnel Trade” (Palestine, UK, 2007, Short Documentary, $500). Honorable Mention awards were presented to Philip Rizk for his short documentary, “This Palestinian Life” (Egypt, Palestine, USA, 2008), and to Nour-Eddine Lakhmari for his fiction feature, “Casanegra” (Morocco, 2008).
Guests then enjoyed a screening of Najwa Najjar’s “Pomegranates & Myrrh.” The Palestinian filmmaker’s first feature film explores real-life issues facing her countrymen who live under Israeli occupation and suffer illegal land confiscations, unwarranted imprisonments and vicious attacks by settlers. Filmed in the Palestinian territories and with a mostly Palestinian crew, Najjar juxtaposes scenes of the heroine, Kamar, visiting her husband in an Israeli prison and conferring with her lawyer (played by leading Israeli human rights attorney Leah Tsemel), with scenes in a Ramallah dance studio where the young wife continues with her dance classes and rehearsals for an upcoming performance. The attentions of a visiting choreographer further complicate Kamar’s unsettled situation. Najjar intentionally left aspects of the plot ambiguous to force her audience to think about the issues she presents. Answering a viewer’s question about unresolved incidents in the film, Najjar responded, ”What do you think?” One “thought” the audience carried with them was that the independent film deserves mass distribution for viewing by international audiences in mainstream theaters.
The evening ended with a screening of Marc Abi Rached’s debut feature, “Help,” which delves starkly into social taboos.
Ibrahim El-Batout’s Candid Q & A
Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim El-Batout opened a window into his soul during the question-and-answer period following the screening of his award-winning film, “Eye of the Sun,” at San Francisco’s Opera Plaza Cinema.
The powerful story of contemporary life, set in Cairo’s impoverished Ein Shams neighborhood, explores such universal issues as political corruption, social inequities, pollution, and environmentally caused terminal illnesses.
“I’m a filmmaker, not a politician,” El-Batout said. “I think my underlying motive in making the film and what I tried to portray is the amount of oppression and corruption in the world, which needs to be changed. I have questions, but no answers. And I’m sharing these questions and hoping that together we can make a better world, because it doesn’t make sense what’s happening around us—from wars, to killings, to damaging the earth.”
One viewer asked El-Batout, who from 1987 to 2004 made documentaries, about the value of making a documentary versus fiction for confronting the issues he presented. The former correspondent, who covered 12 wars in 18 years, responded: “The public has become very fatigued, especially about war. I believed there must be a different way of making reality a bit acceptable. There is a cinematic language where you can get the best out of both genres, but it remains a work in process.”
Regarding his inspiration for making the film, El-Batout explained, “I specialized in covering war. After living through 12 wars, I was personally very confused. I was caught in a vicious circle and to get out of it I needed a lot of energy and a lot of therapy. For me, making this film is part of my healing process…We had no written script in the classical form, and the story was changing all the time.”
None of the cast or crew was paid, and the film was made for $6,000.
“Cinema is changing toward a new visual language,” El-Batout concluded. “I think we will discover it along the way.”
“The Other Half of the Sky”
[Tunisian filmmaker Kalthoum Bornaz (l), and Jean Marie Offenbacher, accepting the Noor Award for best feature documentary for “Tea on the Axis of Evil.” (Staff photo P. Pasquini)]
One of the more controversial films at the Arab Film Festival was “The Other Half of the Sky,” Kalthoum Bornaz’s 93-minute feature about Tunisia’s inheritance law, which elicited a lively discussion between the audience and the filmmaker following its Berkeley screening.
The main characters, 20-year-old brother and sister twins whose mother died giving birth to them, live with their attorney father, who still struggles with the loss of his wife. One day Sélima discovers that upon their father’s death her brother will receive more of his estate than she will. Responding to his daughter’s questioning him about this, he quotes the Qur’anic verse on which the law is based. “This unambiguous verse cannot be interpreted any differently,” he states.
“My film created a big debate and everyone was talking about it,” Bornaz commented. “Since life has changed since the time of the Prophet Mohammed, we have many discussions about this.”
Asked if Tunisians want to break with Islamic law, she responded, “No. We are Muslims.” The inheritance law, she claimed, is the only major controversial legislation. Otherwise, she said, Tunisian women have the same rights as men.
“Tea on the Axis of Evil”
“Syria is a complete black hole. Most Europeans and Americans don’t know anything about it,” Jean Marie Offenbacher said following the screen-ing of her award-winning documentary, “Tea on the Axis of Evil.” The New York-based filmmaker moved to Syria in 2004 because she was “tired of sitting and crying and feeling enraged when I read what was printed in The Washington Post and The New York Times,” she explained. “So I decided to move there, see what it was like and record ordinary life. I noticed that the moment we invaded Iraq the White House started describing Syria and Iran in precisely the same terms they had used to justify the invasion of Iraq. I realized that Syria and Iran were next on the hit list.”
In her 67-minute film, Offenbacher gives voice to the average Syrians she encountered while traveling in cities and in the desert. Taxi drivers, shopkeepers, desert-dwellers, and others discussed their dreams, as well as their daily lives. She learned their views on dating, marriage, education, art, politics and religion. Syrian Minister of Expatriates Butheina Sha’aban expounded on gender equality, while teenagers discoursed on fashion, including whether or not to wear the hijab.
“I think there is a thirst for information about Syria,” the independent filmmaker said, “and I’m happy to be contributing to dispel the wrong notions people have about the country where I met so many kind, warm-hearted people. I wanted to take the microphone away from the radicals and fringe and give it to the people in the center who represent the majority, and that’s what my film is about.”
Arab Cultural Festival
[Qaba’el al-Yemen dancers perform at the Arab Cultural Festival. (Staff photo P. Pasquini)]
On Oct. 11 some 4,000 visitors attended the Arab Cultural and Community Center’s 15th annual festival in Golden Gate Park. Festivalgoers enjoyed Iraqi maqam songs by Saadoun Al-Bayati and Moroccan gnawa music by Yassir Chadly, Bouchaib Abdelhadi and Ensemble. Other entertainers included Qaba’el al-Yemen, hip-hop artist Cherif Triki, and the Ajyal Ensemble, featuring Nazir Latouf and Faisal Zedan. The daylong event also featured a booth bazaar, children’s activities and Middle Eastern cuisine.
Elaine Pasquini is a free-lance journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
