Daniel Asadi Faezi
, 2019
, 8 min
Synopsis: The dried tears of Lake Urmia in northern Iran are for sale – salt in plastic bags at the roadside. Once the biggest lake in the Middle East, only a fraction of it is left today. This is its elegy, presenting both its former splendor and its state today. Wavering between factuality and melancholy, the…
Farnaz Jurabchian, Mohammadreza Jurabchian
, 2016
, 52 min
Synopsis: Over one million Afghans live as refugees in neighboring Iran. For Ismael, Golagha, Kashmir and Nader, the flawed Iranian asylum laws leave them in legal limbo and under constant threat of deportation. To make a living, they work as ball boys in Tehran’s upper-class tennis clubs. Given the contemporary flood of images of refugees arriving…
Elham Hosseinzadeh
, 2004
, 15 min
Synopsis: Set in the era of the American invasion of Iraq, an Iraqi man undertakes the dangerous journey of crossing the wetlands along the border into Iran with hopes of safely collecting a wedding dress for his bride to be from his extended community.
Saeed Dehghani
, 2007
, 20 min
Synopsis: As Southern Iran suffers from economic and political chaos, employment becomes harder to find and a growing number of people turn to a new livelihood — smuggling. As this illegal enterprise becomes especially popular among Iran’s young people, filmmaker Saeed Dehghani offers a look at a growing part of the Middle East’s underground economy in…
October 2022
Mohammed Shebi
This month on Arab Film Series: Mohammed Shebl’s 1981 film Fangs (Anyab) “Weaved into its camp aesthetics, horror genre tropes and 80s disco numbers, Anyab provides a running commentary on the social situation in Egypt, from youth unemployment to class struggle, while intersecting sexual politics into the mix. ” (Gasworks) A girl and her fiancé are…
, 1981
, 100 min
A girl and her fiancé are on their way to a party on New Year’s Eve when their car has an accident, and they find nowhere to go except a strange castle. They are met there by many vampires, led by count Dracula, who instantly falls in love with the girl and wants her for…
Meyar Al Roumi, Hisham Bizri, Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige
WHAT EXISTED YESTERDAY MIGHT DISAPPEAR TOMORROW Curated by Hind Mezaina The past haunts the present in this film program about photography and cinema, featuring four short films by Hisham Bizri, Akram Zaatari, Meyar Al Roumi, and Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joriege. These films delve into a distant or recent past and their consequences today on what was and what could…
Hisham Bizri
, 2006
, 21 min
“Unlike most cinephiles, I’ve never been interested in the cult of the actress – or actor – until Hisham Bizri rendered actress-fascination palpable, even for me, in his “Asmahan”. Reediting a 1944 Egyptian film starring this liberated-for-her-era Syrian actress-singer to center his 21-minute film poem around her, Bizri replaces the original narrative with sequences that…
Akram Zaatari
, 2012
, 32 min
In 1998, Zaatari interviewed Egyptian photographer Van Leo in Cairo. In 2001 he made the video Her + Him VAN LEO and based it on the story of a woman who once entered Studio Van Leo and asked the artist to take pictures of her naked. At the time, Zaatari had access to a few of the…
Meyar Al Roumi
, 2001
, 29 min
Meyar Al Roumi returns to his native Damascus, eager to start making films, but he is censored. He draws inspiration from it to paint a portrait of the Syrian filmmakers most affected by censorship.
