Arabic

Set against the backdrop of the 1967 Six-Day War, the movie adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel follows the escapist, drug-fuelled riverboat meetings of a group of frustrated Egyptians from various walks of life.Read More »

A cinematic masterpiece produced by the revolutionary 1960s generation inspired by the folk hero myths of Nobel Prize Laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Based on his 1977 novel about the Egyptian ‘urban rabble,’ The Harafish, the film portrays the rise of a people’s hero and his rapid corruption through power. Although set in the late 19th century, ‘The Hunger’ can also be read as a commentary on present day social and political realities.Read More »

Stray Bullet AKA Rsasa taycheh (Arabic: رصاصة طايشة‎) is the first long feature film by Lebanese director Georges Hachem. starring Nadine Labaki.

On the end of summer 1976, in the Northern’s suburb of Beirut, Noha is getting married. Her family is relieved for she’s taking her last chance before she becomes an old maid like her older sister. Everything is going for the best until, on that Sunday, Noha changes her mind about the wedding and decides to meet up with her ex-lover. Events of this day will change the family’s life forever.Read More »

synopsis
As far as can be determined, Goha was Tunisia’s first entry in the Cannes Film Festival. Omar Sharif stars as a naïve young man who is taken for granted by friends and family. Little do they know that he has more intelligence, tenacity and imagination than all of them put together. The story takes an unexpectedly dramatic turn when the man falls in love with the young wife of his village’s elderly “wise man”. Based on an ancient Tunisian folk tale, Goha boasts impressive production values and sure-handed direction (by Jacques Baratier).Read More »

Synopsis
His film In This House, 2005 records the search in the garden of a house in southern Lebanon for a letter encased and buried there by a former National Front resistance fighter who had occupied the house in the early 1980s. The split-screen format presents, on one side, the resistance member—now a respected photo-journalist—telling the story of his experience in the house and on the other side, the digging up of the garden and the eventual discovery of the canister containing the letter. The running table of text that accompanies the unfolding narrative identifies the owners of the house and a host of security agents who oversee the operation and whose faces, we are told, are not to be filmed. The anxiety about who or what is allowed to be caught on film together with their growing excitement as the letter is unearthed connotes the poignant tension of a country in a constant state of deferral; the dilemma of whether it is better to unpack the still unresolved consequences of events from the past or to simply carry on, and leave them buried.Read More »

Talal Derki returns to his homeland where he gains the trust of a radical Islamist family, sharing their daily life for over two years. His camera focuses on Osama and his younger brother Ayman, providing an extremely rare insight into what it means to grow up in an Islamic Caliphate.Read More »

Quote:
Isolation and loneliness are the dominant feelings in Youssef’s life after getting divorced from his wife who took the only son they have to live with her. He counts the days till he sees his son once a week. He plays with himself gammon, brews himself some tea and makes breakfast. He deals with everyday adversities with silence and stoicism. He secretly steals his electricity from a neighbor. He reacts to getting a parking ticket with a shrug of his shoulders. He endures his employer’s degradations and double-dealings. When female customers talk of their annoyances regarding their fiancées or other men, he simply doesn’t listen. He’s also come to terms with being the only one around without a mobile phone. Sometimes he takes long drives with his taxi in the streets of Amman or meet up with his friend and talk about his troubles. Suddenly, he finds himself in a serious situation when the doctor tells him about the necessity of having emergency surgery. So he is in the dilemma of the choice; either he has an operation, or buy his son the dog before the stepfather with whom the child lives does… lots of details… single shot scenes… a tone takes you through this isolated world… his taxi running in the streets of Amman compelled to live with his loneliness, dominated by oppression endured by all of us at the times of economic and social grinding crises.Read More »

Quote:
It was in 1981 while I was editing a film, The King of Comedy. We worked at night so no one would call us on the telephone and I would have television on, and one channel in New York at the time, around 2 or 3 in the morning, was showing a film called Transes. It repeated all night and it repeated many nights. And it had commercials in it, but it didn’t matter. So I became passionate about this music that I heard and I saw also the way the film was made, the concert that was photographed and the effect of the music on the audience at the concert. I tracked down the music and eventually it became my inspiration for many of the designs and construction of my film The Last Temptation of Christ. […] And I think the group was singing damnation: their people, their beliefs, their sufferings and their prayers all came through their singing. And I think the film is beautifully made by Ahmed El Maanouni; it’s been an obsession of mine since 1981 and that is why we are inaugurating the Foundation with Trances. (Martin Scorsese, May 2007)Read More »

In Beirut, Syrian construction workers are building a skyscraper while at the same time their own houses at home are being shelled. The Lebanese war is over but the Syrian one still rages on. The workers are locked in the building site. They are not allowed to leave it after 7p.m. The Lebanese government has imposed night-time curfews on the refugees. The only contact with the outside world for these Syrian workers is the hole through which they climb out in the morning to begin a new day of work. Cut off from their homeland, they gather at night around a small TV set to get the news from Syria. Tormented by anguish and anxiety, while suffering the deprivation of the most basic human and workers right, they keep hoping for a different life.Read More »