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LONDON: The Times BFI London Film Festival,
which ended last Thursday, featured over 280 films
from around the world in a 16-day period. Perhaps
tellingly, in 2004 many of these films hailed from
the Middle East or from Mideastern filmmakers
working in the West.
Traditionally, the LFF, coming late on in the
international festival calendar, has built up a
reputation for offering the pick of the "Big Three"
annual film events - Cannes, Venice and Berlin. This
year it had the three much talked-about Arab
features from those events: Danielle Arbid's
Lebanese civil-war movie, "In The Battlefields,"
Tawfic Abu-Wael's portentous "Thirst" and Yousry
Nasrallah's epic adaptation of "Bab al-Shams.
Fresh from its victory at the San Sebastian Film
Festival, a welcome late addition to this year's
program was Iranian Kurd Bahman Ghobadi's "Turtles
Can Fly."
Set in Iraqi Kurdistan on the eve of the U.S. led
invasion last year, the film is a blackly comic,
ultimately tragic tale of innocence lost.
Centring on the exploits of the young central figure
Satellite, named for his ability to install
satellite dishes for the ever news hungry villagers
eager to get up-to-date information on the imminent
military conflict, Ghobadi's film is a heartfelt,
poetically shot tale of everyday people caught up in
events beyond their control.
The director, who has been described as Kurdish
cinema's resident poet laureate, following this film
as well as his earlier award-winning features "A
Time For Drunken Horses" and "Marooned in Iraq," was
in typically combative mood when he spoke to The
Daily Star following the screening.
"It's very clearly anti-war because you see only the
negative aspects and destruction of war. I'm trying
to say in the film that America will never do
anything for us. If anything is going to happen it
has to be done by us, for us. No one else is going
to help us."
Borders feature prominently in all Ghobadi's films,
and "Turtles Can Fly" is no exception. He excels in
showing the plight of a people, whether Iranian,
Iraqi or Kurdish, who seemed destined to a life of
rootlessness, a world where the physical borders
have become sublimated into their psyche, leaving
them as mere passengers on a scarred land hopelessly
fertile with mines.
"The reason for all the tensions, destruction and
wars in the region is due to the borders. Though the
rest of the world is becoming a global village and
unifying its states we are dividing more and more in
the Middle East," he mused on the prevalent role
borders play in his films.
"In Europe, despite the fact that they have
different languages and cultures, they have one
money.
"While with us, we are one community with one
language but we have four borders between us and
different currencies and different passports. For
me, borders are nothing. I don't give any value to
those artificial lines that I cannot see."
For all his passionate observations, the film is
studded with memorably comic moments, particularly
those featuring the adolescent Satellite and his
dealings with the village elders.
Having installed their satellite TVs, the elders ask
him to translate the transmissions of Fox TV and
CNN, only to chastise him whenever he attempts to
watch the "forbidden" viewing of MTV and Rotana.
This vein of humor runs throughout Ghobadi's films
and is embedded in the director himself. Speaking
about the autobiographical similarities with the
leadership qualities of Satellite, he joked, "I
always wanted to be the leader of a gang. Now I'm
the director of a film crew."
Ghobadi's film is one of a number of recent Iranian
films, including last year's "Crimson Gold" by Jafar
Panahi, that have cast off the allegorical shackles
of so much of early Iranian cinema, plumbing instead
ever more bold and daring political depths.
The LFF also boasted two particularly strong
features from directors of Middle Eastern origin
currently plying their trade in the West. It was
good to see "Lila Says," the long-awaited second
film of Ziad Doueiri, the Lebanese director who made
such a splash when his 1998 debut, "West Beirut,"
receive its U.K. premiere.
Set in an impoverished Arab neighborhood in France,
with dialogue almost entirely in French, this is, as
Doueiri was keen to point out, "not an Arab film.
It's a French film." Essentially a love story
between shy Franco-Arab teenager Chimo and the
flirtatiously suggestive 16-year-old Lila, the film
marks a significant transition for Doueiri, shot
with a dreamy lyricism reminiscent of Sofia
Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides." That both films'
soundtracks feature the ethereal compositions of
French band Air can surely be no coincidence.
For all the romantic aspirations of the film,
however, Doueiri cannot help the occasional jibe at
current geopolitics. When Chimo and his friends see
a group of Arabs arrested by the French police, he
complains, "Ever since those ******* blew up New
York, we've been paying for it here as well."
"Lila Says" confirms Doueiri's talent, and one can
only hope it doesn't take another six years before
he makes his next film.
Another delight on offer was Turkish-German director
Fatih Akin's "Head On," which won the Golden Bear at
this year's Berlin Film Festival. At first glance
it's a story of a love affair that develops between
a suicidal young Turkish woman, Sibel, desperate to
escape her strict Islamic family and Cahit, an
older, rebellious lovelorn drunk who has long
forgotten his own Turkish roots.
By turns funny, heartbreaking, romantic and
horrific, Akin's movie is arguably the single best
depiction of Muslims living in the West for many
years. Generally avoiding any mawkish sentimentality
or sloganising, it succeeds in showing the torturous
wonder of falling in love. Akin is undoubtedly a
talent to watch.
Less commendable, however, was Khaled al-Haggar's
"Women's Love." Though the film has been something
of a sensation in its native Egypt, where it was a
box office success, winning the National Film
Institute of Egypt's top seven awards and featuring
an all-star cast including Leila Eloui, Hanan Turk
and Khaled Abu Naga, it was little more than a
diverting, if instantly forgettable comedy about
three feuding sisters forced to live together for a
year in order to claim their deceased father's
inheritance. With such a seemingly fertile concept,
replete with "King Lear" allusions, it was a shame
that Haggar chose to focus simply on broad comedy
rather than offer any attempt at social comment or
insight. The film also suffers in comparison with
other recent Egyptian successes, particularly Ousama
Fawzi's "I Love Cinema," with that film's heady mix
of nostalgia and loss. Though both films offered
love in their titles, ultimately only one of them
was really speaking from the heart.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
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