Arabic

  • Salah Abouseif – Bidaya Wa Nehaya AKA A Beginning and an End (1960)

    1951-1960ArthouseDramaEgyptSalah Abouseif

    Quote:
    Bidaya wa Nihaya (Arabic: بداية و نهاية‎, English: A Beginning and an End) is a 1960 Egyptian film directed by Salah Abouseif and based on the novel by the same name. It was the first film adapted from a novel written by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz.Read More »

  • Tariq Teguia – Gabbla AKA Inland (2008)

    2001-2010AlgeriaDramaPoliticsTariq Teguia

    Quote:
    Malek is a reclusive topographer who accepts a commission to survey a remote part of western Algeria in order to extend the electrical grid. He arrives to find the area has been decimated by religious fundamentalists who have only recently cleared out. Malek meets the local police, the shepherds who are beginning to return, and villagers who invite him to a makeshift party. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by the sound of explosions. Not to worry, explains a local man. When the cicadas land in the sand, it’s enough to trigger off the buried booby-traps. But as Malek soon realizes, it isn’t cicadas setting off the mines, but refugees trying to reach the coast and a boat for Spain. The next day he finds a young woman, exhausted and terrified, hiding in a corner of his shack. Malek decides to drive her to the border, and together they set out toward some indeterminate vanishing point on the horizon. These present-day realities are interspersed with flashbacks to the idealistic political debates of his youth, and set against a soundtrack that mixes alternative rock, Nigerian Afrobeat, and Algerian Rai.Read More »

  • Ala Eddine Slim – Tlamess (2019)

    2011-2020Ala Eddine SlimArthouseFranceMystery

    Quote:
    In Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim’s experimental second feature, a soldier deserts his unit and lives on his instincts in the woods.

    An experimental anomaly on the Tunisian film front, writer-director Ala Eddine Slim has won a following with two films that leave logic and realism behind to chart a muddy course through the minefield of experimental-apocalyptic narrative. Although their meaning is hard to grasp (perhaps on purpose?), they have attracted attention. After Eddine Slim’s first feature The Last of Us was shown in New Directors, New Films in New York, his new but cut-from-the-same-cloth Tlamess turned up in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight. Wherever these enigmatic, schematic and often pretentious works are shown, their basic lack of dramatic truth haunts them and they run the risk of hearing frustrated audiences demand the emperor put some clothes on.Read More »

  • Mohamed Diab – 678 aka Cairo 678 (2010)

    DramaEgyptMohamed Diab

    Unfolds the poignant story of three women and their search for justice from the daily plight of sexual harassment in Egypt.Read More »

  • Mahamat-Saleh Haroun – Daratt AKA Dry Season (2006)

    Mahamat-Saleh Haroun2001-2010ChadDrama

    Quote:
    Chad, 2006. After a forty-year civil war, the radio announces the government has just amnestied the war criminals. Outraged by the news, Gumar Abatcha orders his grandson Atim, a sixteen-year-old youth, to trace the man who killed his father and to execute him. Atim obeys him and, armed with his father’s own gun, he goes in search of Nassara, the man who made him an orphan. It does not take long before he finds him. Nassara, who now goes straight, is married, goes to the mosque and owns a small bakery. After some hesitation Atim offers him his services as an apprentice. He is hired then it will be easy for him to gun down the murderer of his father. At least, that is what he thinks…Read More »

  • Omar El Zohairy – Feathers (2021)

    Drama2021-2030EgyptOmar El Zohairy

    A passive mother who dedicates her life to her husband and children. Stuck in daily, repetitive, mundane chores, she has made herself as little as she possibly could. When a magic trick goes wrong at her 4-year-old son’s birthday party, an avalanche of coincidental absurdities befalls the family. The magician turns her husband, the authoritarian father, into a chicken. The mother is now forced to come to the fore and take care of the family while moving heaven and earth to bring her husband back. As she tries to survive, she goes through a rough and absurd transformation.Read More »

  • Tariq Teguia – Thwara Zanj AKA Zanj Revolution AKA Revolution Zendj (2013)

    Tariq Teguia2011-2020AlgeriaArthousePolitics

    Quote:
    Ibn Battuta works as a journalist for an Algerian daily newspaper. While covering community clashes in Southern Algeria, he finds himself incidentally picking up the trail of long forgotten uprisings against the Abbasid Caliphate, back in 8th-9th century Iraq. For the purpose of his investigation he goes to Beirut, a city that used to embody the hopes and struggles of the Arab World…Read More »

  • Ayten Amin – Souad (2021)

    2021-2030ArthouseAyten AminDramaEgypt

    Synopsis:
    Souad, a 19-year-old young woman, leads a double life. While remaining conservative and veiled among her family and society, Souad is obsessed with her image on social media and goes into several secret virtual relationships with men. She constantly lies about her personal life, projecting wishful images of a different desired life. Her ambitions are slowly crushed by the invasion of her true reality. A series of small incidents lead to a tragic event, that makes Rabab, her 13-year-old little sister, embarks on a real-life journey looking for answers.Read More »

  • Anwar Wagdi – Ghazal al-banat AKA The Flirtation of Girls (1949)

    1941-1950Anwar WagdiComedyEgyptMusical

    Quote:
    Featuring a legendary ensemble from the classic age of Egyptian Cinema, starring Naguib El-Rihani, who’s probably had the most influence on theatre and comedy in the Middle East even close to a century from his death, with only eight films in production before an untimely death during filming Ghazl al-banat. The beautiful Jewish singer, Layla Murad, Youssef Wahby, and the musical prodigy of Mohamed Abdel-Wahab, the most celebrated composer of the time. A heartwarming comedy from a bygone era.Read More »

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