How con­tem­po­rary Arab cin­e­ma is chal­leng­ing per­cep­tions of the region

Return­ing for its third edi­tion under the cura­tor­ship of Rasha Salti, Safar is a bian­nu­al show­case of the diver­si­ty of Arab cin­e­ma, a broad group­ing that rep­re­sents one of the excit­ing col­lec­tive out­puts in con­tem­po­rary inter­na­tion­al cin­e­ma. As Rasha notes, with a sense of pride that comes from hav­ing spent years cham­pi­oning a long neglect­ed strand of world cin­e­ma, ​“Arab cin­e­ma has changed a lot in the last 15 years, but in the last five some­thing wild has been hap­pen­ing. It’s almost as if the genie is out of the bottle.”

Hav­ing act­ed as Pro­gram­mer and Cre­ative Direc­tor for ArteEast, a New York based organ­i­sa­tion focused on artists from the Mid­dle East and its dias­po­ras, as well as curat­ing var­i­ous tour­ing pro­grammes of films from the region, Rasha is well placed to ​“show how diverse, broad and dif­fer­ent Arab cin­e­ma has become.” In recent years, as MENA Pro­gram­mer for the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val, she has seen the region’s film­mak­ers devel­op and embold­en along­side the var­i­ous rev­o­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ments of their home nations.

Tasked with pre­sent­ing UK audi­ences with a cross-sec­tion of Arab cin­e­ma, Rasha select­ed eight fea­tures that despite hav­ing no the­mat­ic con­nec­tion are uni­fied by their brav­ery. ​“Films that chal­lenge stereo­types and taboos, films where the veil of cen­sor­ship has been lift­ed.” This is most obvi­ous­ly the case in Avo Kaprealian’s Hous­es With­out Doors, the strongest, most refresh­ing film in the pro­gramme and also the most chal­leng­ing. A col­lag­ist exer­cise in doc­u­men­tary hybridi­s­a­tion, the film uses manip­u­lat­ed clip­pings from the his­to­ry of Armen­ian cin­e­ma to draw par­al­lels between the plight of Syr­i­ans today and the his­toric Armen­ian geno­cide. Mix­ing this archive mate­r­i­al in with impres­sion­is­tic hand­held footage tak­en from Kaprealian’s apart­ment bal­cony and lay­ers of emo­tive, evoca­tive sound, Hous­es With­out Doors shows a flu­id­i­ty and for­mal flex­i­bil­i­ty that is gen­uine­ly lib­er­at­ing, the resul­tant film as potent and mov­ing as it is unclassifiable.

The oth­er exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary at Safar, Lebanese film­mak­er Selim Mourad’s This Lit­tle Father Obses­sion, is sim­i­lar­ly inven­tive and unshack­led. It sees the gay film­mak­er explore his fraught rela­tion­ship with his par­ents through a series of con­fronta­tion­al staged con­ver­sa­tions about his sex­u­al iden­ti­ty that push the lim­its of his par­ents’ tol­er­ance. Explor­ing the issue of lega­cy with­in tra­di­tion­al famil­ial struc­tures, Mourad opens closed cor­ners of his extend­ed family’s his­to­ry, much to his father’s anguish. ​“Why go twirling in this labyrinth?” his father asks ear­ly on. Because the answers that Mourad uncov­ers prove essen­tial to his under­stand­ing of his own sense of self.

More con­ven­tion­al but sim­i­lar­ly impres­sive are two debut Tunisian fea­tures which share a focus on the trans­for­ma­tive pow­er of music. In both Fares Naanaa’s Bor­ders of Heav­en, a slow-burn mar­i­tal dra­ma with tragedy at its core, and Ley­la Bouzid’s As I Open My Eyes, a colour­ful, no less fraught moth­er-daugh­ter rela­tion­ship sto­ry which has been win­ning plau­dits at var­i­ous fes­ti­vals, the female leads under­go rev­e­la­to­ry emo­tion­al trans­for­ma­tions when they take the stage for the first time late on. Explo­sive moments in oth­er­wise low-key dra­mas, these sequences car­ry the emo­tion­al weight of the pre­ced­ing 90 min­utes of mount­ing, region­al­ly spe­cif­ic ten­sions, and lift them to a cathar­tic con­clu­sion that rep­re­sents the impor­tance of unbri­dled self-expres­sion that ties all of the films in Safar.

Also of note is Muayad Alayan’s Love, Theft and Oth­er Entan­gle­ments, in which a des­per­ate Pales­tin­ian man steals a car only to find that the trunk con­tains a Israeli sol­dier. Most­ly a by-the-num­bers thriller, Alayan’s neo-noir is made more enthralling by the intrigue and moral con­flict inher­ent to the polit­i­cal milieu it depicts. Sim­i­lar­ly evoca­tive is Salem Brahami’s Let Them Come, a lean adap­ta­tion which fol­lows a sec­u­lar fam­i­ly strug­gling amid a wave of extrem­ist vio­lence dur­ing Algeria’s ​‘dark decade’ of the 1990s. Though slight­ly dra­mat­i­cal­ly inert for long stretch­es, the film’s con­clu­sion packs a size­able, lin­ger­ing punch.

Safar fea­tures eight films that are entire­ly dif­fer­ent but share a courage and con­vic­tion in what they depict, an urgency in their sto­ry­telling and a free­dom of expres­sion you might not be expect from films of this region. This feel­ing – what Rasha calls the ​“intan­gi­ble, essen­tial ener­gy behind these films” – is real­ly key to the fes­ti­val and what it reveals of the Arab world. Behind all of the films is a pal­pa­ble vital­i­ty and imme­di­a­cy, a sense that we are wit­ness­ing the eman­ci­pa­to­ry effect of ​“film­mak­ers mak­ing films that absolute­ly have to make. I think this comes with watch­ing dic­ta­tors fall. It’s the impact of the Arab Spring that you can­not mea­sure in elec­toral politics.”

Among all of the films at Safar, there’s also a sense of the unex­pect­ed. As Rasha explains, ​“one of the things I’ve learnt over the years pro­gram­ming films is that you should nev­er under­es­ti­mate your audi­ence. Peo­ple have bought a tick­et. They’re pre­dis­posed to being sur­prised, enchant­ed or pro­voked.” Despite vary­ing degrees of qual­i­ty, all of the films she has cho­sen do just this. She adds, ​“these artists dared to open doors and tell sto­ries, to rep­re­sent a real­i­ty that is real­ly there but is not communicated.”

The third Safar film fes­ti­val runs at London’s ICA 14 – 18 Sep­tem­ber. For more info on this year’s fes­ti­val and to book tick­ets vis­it ica​.org​.uk