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Cinema of West Asia: A past ever present

Latika Padgaonkar

Almost inevitably, films from West Asia keep returning to their immediate, painful, oftentimes deadly past, a past that is playing out into a present where the word normalcy has been turned on its head.

Where better to see a clutch of the latest Arab features, documentaries and shorts than at the Arab Film Festival Rotterdam (AFFR, 10-14 June) whose clear focus is, in the words of its president Khaled Chouket, "to contribute to the struggle against the culture of radicalisation and extremism in which, unfortunately, a small part of the Arab minority in Holland is involved".

In its ninth edition now, the festival has preferred to play it small and safe. Several artistic schemes and events launched by Arabs in the Netherlands have folded up for lack of funds. AFFR would rather be regular than overambitious. It runs with minimum costs, shuns stars and stardom. Even so, to keep it going is a challenge.

That an Arab film festival should be held in Rotterdam is probably apt. With the larger, more prestigious International Film Festival of Rotterdam held in January-February every year, there is already a groundswell of support for cinema. By presenting the latest and the most important Arab films produced every year, AFFR tries to meet the expectations of the Arab community and of the growing Dutch audience, says AFFR artistic director Intishal al Timimi. In 2001, the city was named the cultural capital of Europe, and that was when money was available for an all-Arab event.

Besides, Rotterdam, the embodiment of multiculturalism, has a Muslim population of 13 per cent, and a Moroccan-born Muslim, Ahmed Aboutaleb, as its mayor.

Among the 40-odd features, documentaries and shorts from every country in the Arab world — from Morocco to Iraq — what seized my attention was the cinema of the region. Tense, troubled films from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine seem to be indissolubly linked to their times: to wars, invasions, occupation, repressions, resistance, return. They present their makers’ deepest and most personal responses to the tragic stories of this region.

Among the shorts, Mesopotamia by Iraqi director Fenar Ahmed, looks ahead at the year 2020 when the coalition forces have left, civil war has gripped the country and a bunch of people are desperately hiding underground. In Ali the Iraqi by Lebanese director Vatche Boulghourjian, young Ali who has migrated to the United States with his father, is torn between assimilating and rejecting his new environment, between his various identities as an Arab, a Muslim and an Iraqi in America. And in Fatoush, Hisham Abdel Kahlek from Egypt explores what it would mean if Israel and Palestine were to become one country.

Lebanese director Simon El Habre’s The One Man Village is poignant documentary on the daily life of the single man — his uncle — left behind in a small village outside Beirut. The other inhabitants have fled many years ago during the 15-year civil war that raged in the country, and the film touches lightly, effortlessly on the larger issues of war, peace and displacement. In Iraq: Open Shutters, Iraqi director Maysoon Pachachi follows five women who have been brought together and taught how to handle a camera. The camera then becomes an instrument of self-awareness as they learn, take pictures and speak for once about their shattered lives and a savage war which has left no family untouched. Music, on the other hand, replaces the camera in Elyes Baccar’s Music Says (Tunisia). It becomes the saviour of the children living in the Deheisha refugee camp in Palestine, the vehicle for an expression of their unnamed fears and unrecognised anxieties in an environment perennially under threat.

Perforated Memory (Jordan) by Sandra Madi speaks of a group of ex-fidayeen, once the heroes of the Palestinian revolution, now neglected, worn-out and miserable. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein’s deportation in 1980-82 of some five lakh Iraqis accused of being of Iranian origin is the subject of 80-82 by Hameed Haddad. Where did these people disperse, and what did they find in Iraq when they returned after the fall of the regime? And in Virus, Iraqi director Jamal Amin places five friends, all refugees in Denmark, together in a minibus that quickly becomes a microcosm of their country. What begins as a light-hearted trip turns near-explosive as the five who belong to different sects, regions and political persuasions battle over the problems that shake Iraq.

Pomegranates and Myrrh, Palestinian director Najwa Nejjar’s award-winning feature film, is a simple yet powerful story of love and freedom under Israeli occupation, of arrests for the flimsiest of reasons, of illegal detentions, squatters on the land and soldiers in the streets. Into this Nejjar weaves a love of dance of the young bride, a nascent love affair and the moral strictures she faces, all of which make for an intimate work on how a woman might face reality in today’s Palestine. Hatem Ali’s dark yet deeply humane film, The Long Night (Syria), is a comment on a system that jails political dissidents for as long as long as 20 years and then one day unexpectedly releases them. How do families adjust themselves to this unexpected return? And what do the prisoners themselves do? Do they, can they cope? The Long Night is a metaphor for the one unreleased prisoner, a Shakespearean theatre actor, the one who gets left behind.

Over the years, the complexities of life in Beirut have given rise to a number of interesting, sometimes despairing films. In Beirut Open City, Egyptian director Samir Habchi has a photojournalist investigate the brutal interrogation methods used against political dissidents during the Syrian occupation of Lebanon in the ’90s, while in Basra, Ahmed Rashwan, also from Egypt, asks questions of life and death, also through the eyes of a photographer on the eve of the American invasion.

Taken together, films from the West Asian/North African region exhibit an enormous artistic resilience and diversity. That they are entangled in a distressing history gives them an urgency, a vital feel, sometimes even a rough edge as though these stories must be told before it is too late.