Still from Captain Abu Raed, Dir. Amin Matalqa, Jordan, 2007 (Photo credit ICA).[/caption]In partnership with the Dubai International Film Festival and the Arab-British Centre, “This week-long series of classic and contemporary cinema takes audiences on a journey of gripping dramas, subversive comedies and exaggerated melodramas, taking in an array of re-mastered cinematic masterpieces and new releases.”
The screenings include film from across the Arab world but with an emphasis on Egypt, as this was the center of Arab cinematic production for decades. Newer films from Jordan and Lebanon form part of the program as well.
With a ever growing number of Arab film festivals across the Middle East this smaller, London based series of screenings provides Londoners the opportunity to get a taste of a range of Arab films – some of which have featured in these festivals - without traveling far.
Many of the screenings feature conversations with film directors, writers, and producers, allowing for audience engagement with the creative process that led to the production of the films.
The screenings and programs on September 21 will focus on popular cinema and include a screening of a Lebanese musical, Bosta, created after Lebanon’s civil war. Academics will join filmmakers in discussing recent trends in Arab film. Several forums will be held throughout the day entitled Popular Arab Cinema: Academic Perspectives, Arab Cinema in the UK: The Present and the Future, and Arab Cinema – In Practice. Speakers include Dr. Dina Matar, Head of the Centre of Media and Film Studies at SOAS, Monda Deeley of the Zenith Foundation, Jason Wood – Director of Programming at Curzon Cinema, Hussein Fahmy, Egyptian film star, and Brian Whitaker, former Middle East editor of The Guardian.
On September 25, the Jordanian film Captain Abu Raed will be screened and the star Nadim Sawalha and director Amin Matalqa will be in attendance. Majalla readers with an interest in the director’s work can follow these links to earlier articles on both Matalqa and Jordanian film.
I highly recommend this film as a work of great humanity, tenderness, originality, and beauty that is distinctly Jordanian but possesses a universal resonance. It is a work of great dignity and integrity and one of the best films from the Arab world in recent years.
On September 27 the well known and extremely successful film The Yacoubian Building that is considered to be provocative in its honesty and the way it depicts the diversity of contemporary Egyptian society including marginalized individuals, based on a novel, The Yacoubian Building, will be screened and the director will be in attendance.
Other screenings include Alexandria, Why? on September 23 that explores Alexandria in its last cosmopolitan years during World War II, as a backdrop to the hopes of an aspiring adolescent actor and Terrorism and the Kebab, screened on September 26th, a farcical critique of the maddening nature of Egyptian bureaucracy and its stifling impact on Egyptian citizens.
The film screenings are accompanied by writers in residence at the ICA including Malu Halasa who has written on new Arab writing and and is the author of Transit Tehran: Young Iran and its Inspirations. She was a founding editor of Tank magazine and co-curated Culture in Defiance at the Prince Klaus Fund Gallery, examining satire, art, and the struggle for freedom in Syria.
The full program can be found here.
