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Focus on women in 3rd annual Arab, Middle-Eastern film fest in Provincetown & Wellfleet
In years past, the Cape Cod Film Society’s festival of Arab and Middle Eastern Cinema has mostly centered in Provincetown and Wellfleet. Now in its third year, it’s expanded to screens for the Outer Cape to Dennis.
From Thursday through Sunday, April 30 to May 3, 18 films — 11 features and seven short films — are being shown.
“This year, we are screening at two of our regular venues, Waters Edge Cinema in Provincetown and Wellfleet Preservation Hall,” says Rebecca Alvin, the festival’s director. A filmmaker herself, Alvin is a professor of media studies and film at the New School in New York City and mass communication at Cape Cod Community College when she’s not editing Provincetown Magazine.
“The new venues were mostly places I approached — Cape Cod Museum of Art, Provincetown Public Library, and First Parish Brewster, although the Chatham Orpheum expressed interest in it quite a while ago,” she says.
With so much misperception and tension with Arab countries and the Middle East, a festival like this is important to increasing knowledge and understanding between our often-disparate worlds, she says.
“Absolutely: this is the festival’s primary raison d’être,” she says. “Movies are unique in the ability to viscerally connect audiences to characters, which means that when the characters are of different backgrounds than the audience, there is immense potential for fostering personal and direct understanding of other cultures through those characters. Television can do this, too, somewhat, but it is limited because it is so entrenched in corporate culture — there is no ‘independent television’ in America, for example, but there are many independent filmmakers.”
One of the very special guests at the festival is Shiva Balaghi, a visiting fellow in Middle Eastern Studies at Brown University. She will be speaking on Sunday after the 12:15 p.m. showing of “Fifi Howls from Happiness,” a documentary by Mitra Farahani, at the Water’s Edge Cinema in Provincetown
“I’m incredibly excited to be attending the festival for the first time,” Balaghi tells the Banner. “In particular, I’ll be speaking about [the] documentary that explores the life of the great Iranian modern artist, Bahman Mohassess. While highlighting the film, I’ll be speaking more broadly about Iranian art as well as the intersectionality of film and the arts.”
Balaghi says events like this festival are a vital part of bridging gaps in our cultures.
“Programs like the Cape Cod Film [Society’s] Festival are an incredibly important resource on the Middle East,” she says. “I believe filmmakers are important public intellectuals in the region, and film presents an alternative narrative of the contemporary Middle East. It offers a different perspective than what one sees on the evening news.”
Source: provincetown.wickedlocal.com