CINEMAS 2021: FILM FESTIVAL IN MANARAT AL SAADIYAT
Manarat Al Saadiyat (MAS) in Abu Dhabi invited me to curate the 3rd edition of their film festival CineMAS.
This edition will be an in person festival taking place in the venue’s Auditorium between June 20-26. The seating capacity will be limited with social distancing in place and masks will be expected to be worn at all times.
There will be 2 screenings a day and 4 on the last two days which falls on a weekend. I am happy to have an opportunity to curate an entire festival and I approached each day with a theme a double bill, but I also hope attendees will notice a connecting thread between many of the films throughout the week.
The festival includes new and old cinema (most of the new films are UAE / regional premieres), fiction and non-fiction, experimental and video essays.
Since it is a pandemic, there won’t be any filmmakers flown in, but I am aiming to host a couple of talks after some of the films, including one with one the film’s directors (Nezar Andary) who is based in Abu Dhabi.
Tickets can be bought here and below is the schedule and line up of films.
Sunday, June 20 at 7.00PM and 9.00PM
A Celebration of Palestinian Cinema
GAZA MON AMOUR
Directors: Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser
France, Palestine, Germany, Portugal, Qatar, 2020, 87 min, Drama, Arabic with English subtitles, PG-15
Gaza, today. Sixty-year-old fisherman Issa (Salim Dau) is secretly in love with Siham, a woman who works as a dressmaker at the market. Finally determined to propose, he discovers an ancient statue of Apollo in his fishing net, which he decides to hide at home. When the authorities discover the existence of this mysterious treasure, troubles start for Issa. Will he succeed in declaring his love to Siham (Hiam Abbass)?
Directors’ Statement:
”With this film, as with our previous work, we seek to give a glimpse of everyday life on this small piece of land called Gaza. It is a strange place, where the simplest situations can turn out to be immensely complicated. While stuck in this gloomy situation, our protagonist sees life differently. Issa is a romantic and, despite the conservative traditions of his country, despite his age, despite the endless political problems, he makes a stand for the right to love, which makes him a true resistant. The tone of the film may be funny, dark or even bitter at times, but above all it is tender and melancholic, just like Issa and Siham. The most beautiful stories are sometimes the simplest.”
The film had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, 2020.
Monday, June 21
City Dreams
7.00PM
ARAB BLUES (UN DIVAN À TUNIS)
Director: Manele Labidi
France, 2019, 90 min, Comedy, French with English subtitles, PG-15
UAE Premiere
Selma (Golshifteh Farahani), a psychoanalyst, deals with a cast of colourful new patients after returning home to Tunisia to open a practice.
In this sophisticated comedy, Manele Labidi opens a fascinating window into modern Tunisia at a crossroads, with a story of contrasts, contradictions and culture clashes, full of vitality and humour.
9.00PM
DREAMS OF THE CITY (AHLAM AL-MEDINA)
Director: Mohamad Malas
Syria, 1984, 130 min, Drama, Arabic with English subtitles, PG-13
When his father dies, Dib, his younger brother and their mother (Yasmine Khlat) move away from their hometown Quneitra to Damascus. The mother’s despotic father reluctantly takes them in and tries to force the mother to remarry. Overwhelmed by the magic of the city, Dib wants to discover everything and is full of dreams. His daily life is shaped by insults and punishments however.
Dib grows up against a backdrop of the political upheavals of the 1950s (the end of the military dictatorship in Syria and the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Nasser’s taking of power in Cairo, Egyptian and Syrian unification in 1958) and loses his childish illusions in the face of such violence and brutality. The dreams of the city prove to be a nightmare. Mohammad Malas’ partly autobiographical debut film marked the transition to auteur cinema in Syria.
Tuesday, June 22
Film Essays and History Through Cinema
7.00PM
MONOGRAPHS: MOTIFS
2020, 89 min, PG
UAE Premiere
Commissioned and presented by the Asian Film Archive, Monographs is a series of video essays, conceived as a platform to discourse upon the moving image within the context of Asia.
Originated as a response to the uncertainties of the pandemic, and created during various states of isolation and solitude, these diverse works draw upon histories and archives, revealing new vistas of inquiry; ruminations that evince the filmmakers’ deep connections with cinema, society and the self. This programme, entitled Motifs, features films in the collection that cast a critical gaze upon symbols, systems, and the apparatus of power.
GHOST LIKE US
Riar Rizaldi, 2020, 20 min, Bahasa Indonesia & English, with English subtitles
DEATH OF SOLDIER
Truong Minh Quý, 2020, 14 min, Vietnamese with English subtitles
BRAVE REVOLUTIONARY REDUBBED
Kush Badhwar & Renu Savant, 2020, 20 min, English & Hindi with English subtitles
IRANI BAG
Maryam Tafakory, 8 min, No dialogue, English subtitles
SAVED BY THE PARTY-STATE
Maja Korbecka, 15 min, Mandarin & English with English subtitles
HER FIVE LIVES
Saodat Ismailova, 13 min, No dialogue
9.00PM
CANE FIRE
Director: by Anthony Banua-Simon
USA, 2020, 90 min, English, Pidgenglish, Documentary, Hawaiian with English subtitles, PG-13
UAE Premiere
Cane Fire examines the past and present of the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi, interweaving four generations of family history, numerous Hollywood productions, and troves of found footage to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast indigenous and working-class residents as “extras” in their own story.
Wednesday, June 23
Found Footage, Home Movies and Social Histories
7.00PM
MY MEXICAN BRETZEL
Director:Nuria Giménez
Spain, 2019, 72 min, Docufiction, No Dialogue, English subtitles, PG
UAE Premiere
“Lies are just another way of telling the truth.” My Mexican Bretzel uses home movies and fleeting snippets of sound to tell the story of Vivian Barrett, a wealthy Swiss woman, whose WWII pilot-turned-entrepreneur husband changes their lives when he creates a pharmaceutical wonder drug.
From the 40s through 60s, from Le Mans to New York to Hawaïi, vulnerability, loss, truth, and opulence are explored in a way that only cinema allows.
9.00PM
THE FORBIDDEN REEL (L’HISTOIRE INTERDITE)
Director: Ariel Nasr
Canada, 2019, 119 min, Documentary, English, Dari, Pashtu with English subtitles, PG
UAE Premiere
Driven to create amidst war and chaos, Afghan filmmakers gave birth to an extraordinary national cinema.
Driven to destroy, Taliban extremists set out to torch that legacy. Marvelling in the beauty and fragile power of movies, Afghan-Canadian director Ariel Nasr crafts a thrilling and utterly original story of modern Afghanistan.
Thursday, June 24
Trailblazing Women in Music
7.00PM
SHUT UP SONA
Director: Deepti Gupta
India, 2019, 84 min, Documentary, English, Hindi with English subtitles, PG-15
UAE Premiere
Shut Up Sona is a film about today’s India at odds with the modern Indian woman. It is an intimate journey with Sona Mohapatra – famous singer, performer, and troublemaker by choice! Being on the receiving end of blasphemy lawsuits, internet trolling, and death threats are all in a day’s work for Indian singer and leading #MeToo activist. Over three years, filmmaker Deepti Gupta follows Sona as she battles with music execs and India’s patriarchal traditions in her fight for equal space in the music industry and beyond.
The film covers Sona’s life as a performer and as a woman, and exposes the controversy around her that turns into a televised circus, when a legal notice arrives at Sona’s doorstep, accusing her of blasphemy. Her crime was singing an 800-year-old song with devotional lyrics, while being dressed “obscenely”. But, despite the police intervention and the wrath of the internet, nothing stops her from dissenting every day, in order to do what she loves – sing her songs and speak her mind, while managing her public and high-pressure retaliation to her critics.
9.00PM
SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS
Director: Lisa Rovner
United Kingdom, 2020, 85 min, Documentary, English, PG
UAE Premiere
The remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today. Theremins, synthesizers and feedback machines abound in this glorious ode to the women who helped shape, not just electronic music but the contemporary soundscape as we know it.
Avant-garde composer Laurie Anderson narration accompanies fascinating archival footage to trace the history of the technological experimentation of sound, the deconstruction of its parts and the manipulation into something altogether other. While traversing a range of musical approaches and personalities, from academia to outsider art to television commercials, we meet Clara Rockmore, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire and Eliane Radigue, fascinating and enigmatic musical geniuses and their peculiar way of hearing the world.
Friday, June 25
Cities and People
2.00PM
TOKYO RIDE
Directors: Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine
France, Japan, 2020, 90 min, Documentary, English and Japanese with English subtitles, PG
UAE Premiere
Revisiting the genre of the road movie in a very diaristic and personal way, the film takes us on board of Ryue Nishizawa's vintage Alfa Romeo for a day long wandering in the streets of Tokyo.
More than a portrait, in the classical sense, of one of the most talented and celebrated Japanese architect of today, the film renders in its pure spontaneity the experience of this friendly urban drift. Ryue Nishizawa narrates along the way his strong relationship with his home town through some sites he personally affectionates, buildings that have influenced him, and some of his own architecture projects.
The film questions how rooted architecture practice is and how much the built and cultural environment feeds and shapes our imagination.
5.00PM
NASIR
Director: Arun Karthick
India, Netherlands, Singapore, 2020, 78 min, Drama, Tamil with English subtitles, PG-13
UAE Premiere
Nasir is a gentle man with a hard life. He has to scrimp to pay for his daily shopping, sometimes even missing meals. His adopted son Iqbal has the body of an adult, but the mind and vulnerability of a toddler. In spite of it all, Nasir remains optimistic. He writes love letters to his wife and declaims his poetry, which silences even the most idiotic loudmouth.
Nasir is also a Muslim in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where Hindu nationalism has taken on ever more virulent forms in recent decades. Propaganda constantly booms from loudspeakers everywhere in the public space. His boss at the textile store makes little effort to hide his contempt for Muslims. The customers treat Nasir as a doormat. In the meantime, Nasir starts worrying about his wife, who is out of town for a few days, and wonders whether he would be better off as a migrant labourer in Abu Dhabi.
7.00PM
GHOST TROPIC
Director: Bas Devos
Belgium, 2019, 85 min, Drama, French with English subtitles, PG
UAE Premiere
After a long day at work, fifty eight-year-old Khadija falls asleep on the last subway train. When she wakes up at the end of the line, she has no choice but to make her way home on foot. On her nocturnal journey she finds herself compelled to ask for and give help to the other inhabitants of the night.
9.00PM
GHOSTS (HAYALETLER)
Director: Azra Deniz Okyay
Turkey, France, Qatar, 2020, 90 min, Drama, Turkish with English subtitles, PG-13
UAE Premiere
In Istanbul, on the verge of a country-wide power surge, four characters come across in a neighborhood undergoing the process of gentrification for the “New Turkey”: a mother whose son is in prison, a young female dancer, a feminist artist, and a cunning middle man.
Their stories intertwine during a drug deal, offering a roaring tale of the contemporary generation.
Saturday, June 26
Unknown Histories
2.00PM
BEYOND THE VISIBLE - HILMA AF KLINT
Director: Halina Dyrschka
Germany, 2019, 93 min, Documentary, English, German and Swedish with English subtitles, PG
UAE Premiere
Hilma af Klint was an abstract artist before the term existed, a visionary, trailblazing figure who, inspired by spiritualism, modern science, and the riches of the natural world around her, began in 1906 to reel out a series of huge, colorful, sensual, strange works without precedent in painting. The subject of a recent smash retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, af Klint was for years an all-but-forgotten figure in art historical discourse, before her long-delayed rediscovery.
Director Halina Dryschka’s dazzling, course correcting documentary describes not only the life and craft of af Klint, but also the process of her mischaracterization and erasure by both a patriarchal narrative of artistic progress and capitalistic determination of artistic value.
5.00PM
HER SOCIALIST SMILE
Director: John Gianvito
USA, 2020, 93 min, Documentary, English, PG
UAE Premiere
An experimental documentary essay on the political imagination of iconic humanitarian, author, and advocate for the blind Helen Keller. World famous by the age of 8 for having learned how to read and communicate through the finger alphabet, indelibly dramatized in William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker, Helen Keller (1880-1968) remained for the course of her 87 years the most revered blind-deaf woman on the planet.
Largely omitted or minimized within the voluminous literature her life generated however was the fact that Keller had become, by time she reached her thirties, a committed believer in the principles of Socialism. The product of years of research, Her Socialist Smile resurrects the radical Keller, serving as a rousing reminder that Keller’s undaunted activism for labor rights, pacifism, and women’s suffrage was philosophically inseparable from her battles for the rights of the disabled.
Homage to Classic Arab Cinema
7.00PM
UNLOCKING DOORS OF CINEMA
Director: Nezar Andary
Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, 2019, 61 min, Documentary, Arabic with English subtitles, PG
UAE Premiere
Unlocking Doors of Cinema is a feature documentary exploring the fifty years of artistic contribution of the daring Syrian auteur Muhammad Malas. Malas, an exile from his home town of Quneitra, provokes audiences to contemplate loss, memory, and home.
From the 1967 War and Palestinian Camps in Beirut, to the songs of Aleppo, and the political tragedies of Syria, Malas exemplifies what it means to be an auteur and public intellectual. Unlocking Doors of Cinema takes you on a unique cinematic journey where creative cinematography becomes a visual conversation with the auteur’s own five decades of work.
9.00PM
THE DREAM (AL-MANAM)
Director: Mohamad Malas
Syria 1987, 45 min, Arabic with English subtitles, PG-13
Shot in 1980-81, the film is composed of interviews with different Palestinian refugees including children, women, old people, and militants from the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila, Bourj el-Barajneh, Ain al-Hilweh and Rashidieh in Lebanon.
In the interviews Mohamad Malas questions them about their dreams at night. The dreams always converge on Palestine: a woman recounts her dreams about winning the war; a fedai of bombardment and martyrdom; and one man tells of a dream where he meets and is ignored by Gulf emirs.
During filming Malas lived in the camps and conducted interviews with more than 400 people. In 1982 the Sabra and Shatila massacres occurred, taking the lives of several people he interviewed, and he stopped working on the project. He returned to it in 1986 and edited the many hours of footage gathered into this 45 minute film, released in 1987.