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The 10 Best Arab Films
The Night (Al-Lail)
Mohammad Malas, 1993
A great Syrian film. It is about the director’s home town of Quneitra, on the borders of the Golan Heights, which was almost completely destroyed by the Israelis after the 1967 war and remains in ruins. The film is a historical-autobiographical epic of three generations, taking you from the Syrian fight for independence against the French in the 1930s, through the 1948 war with Israel, and into recent times. Malas is probably the most highly regarded living Syrian director – he is still based in Damascus as far as I know – and this film is heavily influenced by Tarkovsky in the use of long, contemplative dream and memory sequences where time is as important an expressive element as space, dialogue or movement.
The Mummy (Al-Mummia), aka The Night of Counting the Years
Shadi Abdel Salam, 1969
This was the most successful full-length feature film by Shadi Abdel Salam, who started his career as an assistant to Rossellini and Mankiewicz (on Cleopatra) and died quite young. Set in Egypt at the end of the 19th century, it tells of a peasant family living off the illegal trade in pharaonic treasures. The theme here is the continuity between ancient and modern Egypt and the importance of preserving pharaonic culture. Abdel Salam, also a great costume and set designer, based everything on meticulous research. Its aesthetic rigour was never again rivalled in Egyptian cinema.
Watch out for ZouZou (Khally ballak min ZouZou)
Hassan Al Imam, 1972
I love musicals, and this one is particularly good as it was written by the great cartoonist, poet and satirist Salah Jaheen. It is a comedy of class conflict – Zouzou (Soad Hosny) comes from Cairo’s popular quarters but is attending the liberal world of university. It’s a satirical film but sexy and lively. If you watch this, and then visit a Cairo university campus today, with its veiled girls and bearded boys, you will be shocked by how conservative and reactionary Arab urban society has become in the past 40 years.
The Cruel Sea (Bas-Ya-Bahar)
Khalid Al Siddiq, 1972
This, I think, is the first feature film ever made in Kuwait by a Kuwaiti director. Shot in black and white, it evokes the pre-oil days when Kuwait relied almost entirely on the sea, either for trade or for pearl-fishing. Men would go to sea for months, leaving the women, children and elderly to fend for themselves. The sea is the main character here – initially the source of all things beautiful but equally a monster that destroys lives. The film is a Greek tragedy of sorts, and despite its formal simplicity, it is technically ambitious and very beautiful. I also admire the spare acting style.
Fertile Memory (Al Dhakira al Khasba)
Michel Khleifi, 1980
The Palestinian Michel Khleifi is probably the finest Arab film-maker of his generation. I must declare an interest here as we have worked together for more than 20 years, but in truth I admire all his films. His most famous is Wedding in Galilee, but for me his most moving and exciting work is the documentary that made his name.Fertile Memory is a portrait of two women: one a radical young Palestinian novelist, a divorcée, living with her daughters in the Occupied Territories; the other Khleifi’s illiterate aunt, who lost her husband just after the 1948 war. This is the first feminist Arab film and it has a very keen sense of observation and political engagement.
The Dupes (Al-makhdu’un)
Tewfik Saleh, 1973
Set in Iraq, shot in Syria, based on a famous Palestinian novel by Ghassan Kanafani (assassinated by the Israelis in 1972) and directed by an Egyptian, this harrowing film is about a group of Palestinian workmen in the early 50s trying to cross the border illegally from Iraq into Kuwait, to join the oil boom. They get a lift inside a water tank and are stuck there when the driver is held up by customs officials. The action takes place inside the tank in the searing desert heat as the men dream of the homes and loved ones they left behind. A classic of the Palestinian experience.
Man of Ashes (Rih Essed)
Nouri Bouzid, 1986
This powerful film about working-class boys growing up in Tunisia caused a stir because it deals with sexual harassment and homosexuality. A carpentry apprentice is about to celebrate his wedding but he and his close friend have both been victims of sexual abuse, notably by the monstrous local carpenter. This dark secret threatens to come out before the young man’s wedding. Several Arab films in the mid-80s – another is Michel Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee – explored the close links between sexual oppression and political and social oppression, whether in the form of traditional patriarchal orders or foreign military occupation or entrenched class interests. Man of Ashes does this brilliantly.
The Call of the Nightingale (Doa al-Karawan), aka The Nightingale’s Prayer
Henry Barakat, 1960
Barakat was the master of classical cinema in Egypt, and this film is based on a novel by the great Taha Hussein. It is humane and beautifully made. The heroine, a peasant girl, decides to take revenge on a handsome engineer who has seduced her sister and caused her “honour” killing by her uncle. In order to do so, she becomes his live-in maid but soon finds herself falling in love with him. It stars a very young Faten Hamama, who went on to become a huge star and who plays every role with grace and elegance, without ever seeming contrived or dull.
12 Angry Lebanese
Zeina Daccache, 2009
I was on the jury when this won the top documentary award at Dubai in 2009. The director is a young Lebanese drama-therapist who put on a production of 12 Angry Men inside Lebanon’s most notorious prison and filmed the long protracted process. The film was partly an attempt to reform the country’s criminal and penal laws and improve prison living conditions. It also enabled Daccache to extend her drama-therapy work to prisons across Lebanon, and she had started working in Syria shortly before the current conflict began. It is deeply moving and full of humanity, particularly in the way it describes the process of lifting men from a profound states of despair into a renewed desire to live and build a different future for themselves.
Chitchat on the Nile (Thartharah fawq al-Nil) aka Adrift on the Nile
Hussein Kamal, 1971
Based on a novel by Naguib Mahfouz, this film’s theme is decadence. It is set on an illicit barge on the Nile where disenchanted government employees meet to get drunk and smoke hashish. Made soon after President Nasser’s death, the film is critical of the old “socialist” bureaucracy, which had become extremely corrupt. It has the foresight and courage to mark the end of an era, with eyes keenly locked on a not-very-promising new one. One could consider the film overmoralising in that it conflates sexual freedom with corruption, but it has a great subversive power and is still banned in many Arab countries.
Omar al-Qattan
The Guardian