Shams Al-Ma’arif is a 2020 Saudi comedy film directed by Faris Godus. It premiered on July 22, 2020, in Jeddah, then in Riyadh. It was widely released in Saudi Arabia on July 31, 2020. The film was supposed to premiere in the Red Sea International Film Festival but it got delayed due to the Coronavirus pandemic.Read More »
Fatima-Zahra and her teenage son Selim move from place to place, forever trying to outrun the latest scandal she’s caught up in. When Selim discovers the truth about their past, his mother vows to make a fresh start. In Tangier, new opportunities promise the legitimacy they each crave, but not without pushing the volatile mother-son relationship to the breaking point. The Damned Don’t Cry combines melodrama and neorealism to tell the story of a mother-son relationship on the fringes, observing the effects of oppression – both economic and affective – in a cut-throat world. Borrowing its title from a 1950s Joan Crawford melodrama, The Damned Don’t Cry employs non-professional actors for its two main actors and almost the entire cast. In his second feature which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, writer-director Fyzal Boulifa manages to avoid pastiche while ‘readily embracing some of the formal elements of melodrama’ as he takes his inspiration from Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and Le notti di Cabiria.Read More »
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Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, is a land border between the African continent and Europe. A buffer zone where European migration policies, their challenges and their consequences are read and shown. A place towards which converge the migrants of the Maghreb. They are “those who burn”. They have nothing else to lose except wanting to live to the end.Read More »
Voted among the Greatest Egyptian Films at the 1996 Cairo Film Festival
It shows the incredulity of exaggerated hardships a young man has to go through to get married in Egypt, with lower than average incomes, and inability to find a decent job in an ever more competitive world. Basic needs like shelter are even hard to sustain.
The young man and the girl cannot pay the bill, going through a myriad network of all sorts of shady people to help them, to no avail.
In the end, only the walls of the ancient pyramids provide shelter for the homeless lovers.Read More »
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My Frightening Rushed Palestinian Roadblock Wedding
Like the 1999 German hit “Run Lola Run,” the new movie by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad opens with an ultimatum and a plucky heroine alone in her room, wondering which way to turn. Both films feature menacing dogs, lost plastic bags, and an aimless, poorly shaved lover.
But that’s where the similarities end, because contemporary Berlin is a happier place than Jerusalem in 2003. For one thing, Tom Tykwer’s redhead Lola didn’t have to deal with roadblocks, trigger-happy soldiers, and bomb squads. For another, Lola was fiercely self-determined, while Rana (Clara Khoury) has to contend not only with political oppression but the dominating role men are assigned in her culture.Read More »
In April, 1975, civil war breaks out; Beirut is partitioned along a Moslem-Christian line. Tarek is in high school, making Super 8 movies with his friend, Omar. At first the war is a lark: school has closed, the violence is fascinating, getting from West to East is a game. His mother wants to leave; his father refuses. Tarek spends time with May, a Christian, orphaned and living in his building. By accident, Tarek goes to an infamous brothel in the war-torn Olive Quarter, meeting its legendary madam, Oum Walid. He then takes Omar and May there using her underwear as a white flag for safe passage. Family tensions rise. As he comes of age, the war moves inexorably from adventure to tragedy.Read More »
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Sheikh Imam or Imam Mohammad Ahmad Eissa, born in 1918, is known in the Arab world for his songs critical of the ruling class. Considered the voice of the oppressed, he was banned from state television and radio, and was imprisoned many times, including in 1974 during the visit of President Nixon.Read More »
Set in the north of Syria, a village idiot with an enormous nose (Ismail) falls in love with his beautiful neighbor (Salma), thus he sends his handsome friend – who also falls in love with her- to deliver her oral love letters.Read More »
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Frustrated with the limits placed upon her because of her gender, a small-town Saudi doctor takes matters into her own hands and runs for local council, in this family drama from Haifaa Al-Mansour (Wadjda, Mary Shelley).
After her debut feature Wadjda (2012) broke new ground as the first-ever film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia — and the first made by a Saudi woman — director Haifaa Al-Mansour shifted to Hollywood with the TIFF-selected biopic Mary Shelley (2017) and Netflix’s Nappily Ever After (2018). Now, she returns to the kingdom with The Perfect Candidate, a tale of one woman’s quest to challenge not only the system but also herself.Read More »