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Arab Film Festival to Open in the Twin Cities
Foreign-film festivals are travel without the cost, the inconvenience and the crowds. From your comfy seat in a climate-controlled movie theater, popcorn in hand, you can journey to exotic, faraway places – like a palatial villa in Tangiers and a garden in northern Iraq. Or an apartment in Damascus, with bombs exploding nearby, a prison in Beirut, a factory in Cairo and a labor camp in Dubai. Those are places most of us wouldn’t go, even if we could. But for 90 minutes or so, if we’re willing, filmmakers working under vastly different circumstances from Hollywood can take us there.
Founded in 2002 by Mizna, the Twin Cities-based organization that promotes Arab American culture with a literary journal, public arts events and classes, the Arab Film Festival is now in its 9th year, sufficiently well-established to partner for the first time with the Film Society of Minneapolis St. Paul and move into its St. Anthony Main Theatre. From opening night Thursday (Nov. 6) through Sunday evening, it will present dozens of features and shorts from Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Syria, Morocco and other places.
The festival has a purpose beyond showing films by and about Arabs that have not yet been seen in Minnesota. For a change, the Arabs on screen are not terrorists, temptresses, villains or thieves, the usual Hollywood stereotypes. They are men and women, parents, children, factory workers, artists. This year, the festival broadens its scope to include non-Arab peoples of the Middle East (South Asian expats, Turkmen Iraqis) and non-Arabic speaking citizens of Arab countries (Somalis).
The program includes several Minnesota premieres. Four films are by female directors (there goes another stereotype); two Arab women directors (Éliane Raheb, “Sleepless Nights,” and Nadia Shihab, “Amel’s Garden”) will be present for Q&As. Two screenings will be followed by panel discussions, including one (after “Scheherazade’s Diary”) about drama therapy in prisons.
Written and directed by Laila Marrakchi, “Rock the Casbah,” the French-Moroccan film that opens the festival, is a family drama with twists. Wealthy patriarch Moulay Hassan (even Minnesotans will recognize Omar Sharif) has died unexpectedly, and the traditional three days of mourning are about to begin. Sofia, the youngest daughter, has flown home from America, where she works as an actress (and is often cast as a terrorist). Her two older sisters cut her no slack for leaving Morocco and marrying an American. Among rituals, visits and tears, secrets emerge, and memories of a fourth sister who died years earlier.
Beautifully filmed, bitter and sweet, with a very engaging cast, “Rock the Casbah” draws you into the story, the scenery and the family battles. The song on the soundtrack that will break your heart is “The Great White Ocean” from the album “Swanlights” by Antony and the Johnsons, whose lead singer, Antony Hegarty, lived for a time in Minnesota. It’s a small world after all.
If you saw “Slumdog Millionaire,” which swept the 2009 Oscars, “Champ of the Camp,” which screens Sunday afternoon, may remind you a bit of that film. Yes, there’s a contest with screaming crowds and an unlikely winner, but the parallels end there. “Slumdog” was a fiction, “Champ” is a documentary, filmed in a labor camp in Dubai, where men from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh live eight to a room and work long hours in baking heat to support distant families they seldom see. Men like these helped build Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, but they will never set foot inside.
Once each year, workers compete for prizes (vouchers for money to send home, flat-screen TVs) by singing and demonstrating their knowledge of Bollywood songs and stars. They sing anyway, in the camp and while they work, as a way to relieve their sadness and loneliness. The contest is something to aim for, a temporary spotlight, a glimmer of hope beyond their daily drudgery.
The film is too shiny in places, and it makes the men’s lives look not so bad, which is where the fiction comes in. Many paid large sums to recruitment agents for their jobs; they earn less than $300 a month, and they have few or no rights. To gain access to the camp and the contest, which was founded by Western Union (the company many workers use to wire their wages home), Lebanese director Mahmoud Kaabour couldn’t dwell on the working conditions, the human rights violations, and the UAE’s treatment of foreign workers. The camp looks remarkably clean, and a room we’re shown seems no worse than some dorm rooms we’ve seen. But the faces of the men tell more of the story, even when they’re singing.
Visit the festival website FMI, including a complete schedule, trailers, director bios and ticketing. All screenings except opening night are $8. Festival passes are still available.
Pamela Espeland
Minnesota Post