Arabic

In Gaza, two hairdressers and ten customers of various ages and backgrounds spend the day trapped in a beauty salon while Hamas police fight a gang in the street.Read More »

A Palestinian seeks Israeli permission to waive curfew to give his son a fine wedding. The military governor’s condition is that he and his officers attend. The groom berates his father for agreeing. Women ritually prepare the bride; men prepare the groom. Guests gather. The Arab youths plot violence. One Israeli officer swoons in the heat and Arab women take her into the cool house. A thoroughbred gets loose and runs to a mined field; soldiers and Arabs must cooperate to rescue it. As darkness falls, tensions between army and villagers rise, and the groom’s wedding-night anger and impotence threaten family dignity and honor. Can cool heads prevail?Read More »

In We No Longer Prefer Mountains, Halabi reflects upon the particular political and social condition of the Druze community living in occupied Palestine, taking individual and personal stories as a point of departure. It begins with an ascent of Mount Carmel upon which the Druze towns of Dalyet el Carmel and Isfiya are located, drawing the viewer into a world of geographic isolation and a locale shaped by coercion and control. Living mostly in mountainous areas in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine/Israel, as well as in diaspora globally, the Druze maintain close-knit social and religious ties as a minority within and across national borders.Read More »

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Director Daoud Abdul-Sayed builds his drama on the human being, as he introduces to us Ahmed Zaky in different human faces: He is Yehia, the police officer who is in a secret mission in the underworld of drug dealers and he is also Yehia Abu Daboura, the drug dealer who is living his daily life as an outlaw. These different and contradicting roles of one man helped in enriching the drama in this movie.In between, you will meet another major role: Adam, the mail man who used to get the messages or secret reports from Yehia, assuming that he is reporting to his higher officers. Adam is like the person in the middle between Yehia the police officer and Yehia the drug dealer. Yehia tells us during the movie that he/ or the drug dealer became a wealthy man. Read More »

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 »