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Arab Film Festival Launches into New Era
In a landscape cluttered with entertainment options, a cultural event such as the Arab Film Festival plays an important role in helping migrant communities stay close to their roots. As well showcasing the best of film from across the Arabic-speaking region, the festival – inaugurated in 2001 – also provides an outlet for locally-made product.
Returning to its original home at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatres with a four-day event starting on July 1, the event has also gone national with Canberra, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane hosting programs of shorts and features.
The festival is run by Information and Cultural Exchange, known for its successful work with newly-arrived migrant and refugee communities, as well as for youth arts. The event forms part of a wider commitment to screen culture. For instance, ICE’s partnership with the Parramatta City Council has yielded the Switch multimedia and digital arts access centre, which offers facilities and cost-effective digital training to the public.
“We’re pretty responsive to community needs and don’t often say ‘no’ to anything,” says ICE’s cultural development program manager Mouna Zaylah. “Across Western Sydney there’s a lot for us to do but we often partner with other organisations and we’re in a good position to share our resources.”
Zaylah co-directs the film festival alongside Fadia Abboud, an educator and filmmaker whose credits include the documentary I Remember 1948, which screened on SBS in 2008.
“The festival started out as part of a wider exhibition showcasing Arab artists,” Abboud explains. “With so many film submissions coming it soon made sense to launch a stand-alone film festival. Things have changed with the types of films we’re showing; we can now get films with a bigger budget, because we can afford to, as well as films with no budget.”
Abboud was looking forward to the prospect of staging the festival outside of Sydney in locations home to smaller but very enthusiastic Arab communities.
Arab Australians generally get their movie fix from Arabic-language satellite television, which Zaylah estimates is broadcast into 80 percent of Arabic-speaking homes. She says that Lebanon and Egypt are particularly prolific centres of entertainment production, whilst the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is starting to develop a stronger presence.
The availability of pirated DVDs also presents some challenges when it comes to curating the festival, according to Abboud.
“Since we’ve been putting on the festival we’ve wanted to attract Arab audiences with films that people hadn’t seen on ripped off DVDs that they found at the markets,” Abboud says. “We’ve had to find films that weren’t affected by that. For instance, we avoid the big melodramas that usually seem to get ripped off, and we’ve had to find something quite particular for the local Arab audience otherwise they would say ‘Oh, we’ve already seen that’.”
Abboud suggests that a major drawcard of the festival is a chance for Arab youth to connect with their heritage.
“Arab audiences, like all people, aren’t going to the movies as much as they used to but one thing to our advantage with the festival is that a younger generation can connect with their grandmother or their mother or their aunt by coming along together, which we see a lot of,” she says. “The newer generation might not understand all the Arabic but they can still get the nuances.”
This year’s festival will be opened by Ali Mostafa’s City of Life (pictured below), a multilingual drama set in modern Dubai.
Exploring the racial, ethnic and class divides of an emerging multicultural society, City of Life surrounds the lives of three diverse characters: a privileged but troubled young Arab, an Indian taxi driver and a Romanian ballet dancer. The multinational cast includes Romanian-German Alexandra Maria Lara, India’s Sonu Sood, UAE actors Saoud Al Ka’abi and Habib Ghuloom, Brit Jason Flemyng and Egyptian comic Ahmed Ahmed.
Another highlight of the festival program is Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story (pictured below) from Egyptian director Youssry Nasrallah, who Abboud describes as an “Arab Almodovar”.
Telling a story within a story, the Cairo-set film focuses on a female talk-show host who’s married to an opportunistic newspaper editor for a government-owned daily and finds her professional life compromised by her husband’s ambitions.
There’s also the Algerian film Harragas (pictured below), which Abboud suspects will be of interest to Australians for its theme of people smuggling.
Directed by Merzak Allouache, the drama is set in a northern Algerian city where a group of desperate refugees place their lives in the hands of a smuggler and embark on a journey to Spain in a rickety boat.
The other features appearing in the festival are: Zeina Daccache’s documentary 12 Angry Lebanese, which takes place at Lebanon’s notorious Roumieh Prison where the director herself spent 15 months working with inmates to present an adaptation of the stage play Twelve Angry Men; Palestinian film The Time That Remains (Sydney only), directed by Elia Suleiman, a semi-autobiographical film about the experiences of a family since 1948; and – in a reminder of the capacity for football to unite those from disparate backgrounds – Iraqi Shawkat Amin Korki’s Kick Off (Sydney and Canberra) in which a half-destroyed football stadium doubles as a shanty town for refugees and an idealistic young man organises a match between the Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen and Assyrian boys of the camp.
“We have to be selective because we actually have a very tight program and we couldn’t put three films in from Lebanon even if there are three good ones,” Abboud says of the selection process. “Last year we had a film from Jordan but this year it’s the UAE, with a film from Dubai. Unless it’s good we won’t put it in the festival.”
Complementing the features are the Arabian Nights Animation Collection, curated by Egyptian animation lecturer Mohamed Ghazala, and shorts emanating from Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Bahrain, Kuwait, France and Australia.
Among the Australian films is a 10-minute collection of archived home movies from 1940-1980, which is screening in Sydney and Canberra with live oud accompaniment by local musician Mohamed Youssef. Other local shorts include Ramzi Nabulsi’s Traveller, about a Sudanese refuge and his struggles to assimilate; Ali Kadhim’s Mohammad (pictured above), a personal documentary into the life of a young boy who lives through the physical movement of Parkour; and Zayaan Jappie’s Rima, about a young Muslim Australian woman who just happens to be a rev-head.
Abboud is conscious that whilst local Arab filmmaking received a lift and grabbed attention with the mainstream success of The Combination and Cedar Boys, there are many more storytellers waiting to be given a voice.
“Very soon we’ll have to get beyond all the violence and the drug dealers,” she says. “That’s what gets the press coverage and there’s a process you have to go through: with Italian films you had to get the gangster characters out of the way first to get beyond that and hopefully we’ll do the same.”
The Arab Film Festival takes place in Sydney (July 1-4, Riverside Theatres Parramatta), Melbourne (July 9-11, Cinema Nova, Carlton), Canberra (July 14-17, National FIlm and Sound Archive, Acton), Adelaide (July 24-25, Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas) and Brisbane (July 30-31, Dendy Cinemas Portside).
David Hull
SBS.com