1. IN THE FUTURE THEY ATE FROM THE FINEST PORCELAIN in Berlin, Paris and Washington
2. AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE in Berlin
3. THE NIGHT in Paris
4. HAUNTED – DVD with institutional or homevideo rights
5. publication
6. DVD of the month – LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES
-----------------------------

1. IN THE FUTURE THEY ATE FROM THE FINEST PORCELAIN in Berlin, Paris and Washington

Larissa Sansour’s and Soren Lind’s Sci-fi IN THE FUTUTRE THEY ATE FROM THE FINEST PORCELAIN shows this month at the Rencontres International in Berlin, Palestine Film Festival in Paris as well as The Smithonian Institute in Washington.

Content
In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity.
A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain – suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilization. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands.
Palestine/Denmark/UK/Qatar 2015, 29 min, digital, cinescope, Arabic with English subtitles
more (incl. trailer)
--------------------------------

2. AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE in Berlin

Mohammad Shawky Hassan’s experimental film AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE which is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York is presented at the Rencontres International in Berlin this month.

Content
Today in this house nothing happens, nor does it in the homes of others. Time and place stand on parallel lines, refuting the coordinates of existence. The chronology of events is obscured, subversive noise is obliterated, elucidation impossible and language futile. All that remains is a soundscape perpetually occupied by self-proclaimed patriots, and scattered spaces carved by the rhythm of everyday life, all conspiring to maintain the status quo while hiding the humming background noise of the world.
And on a Different Note is a navigation of an attempt to carve out a personal space amid an inescapable sonic shield created primarily by prime time political talk shows with their indistinguishable, absurd and at times undecipherable rhetoric/ noises. Equally repulsive and addictive, these noises travel across geographies gradually constituting an integral part of a self-created map of exile.
Egypt 2015, 24 min, color, Arabic/ English with English/Arabic Subtitles
more
---------------------------

3. THE NIGHT in Paris

In the framework of the program on 50 years of the occupation of 1967 the Palestinian Film Festival in Paris is showing Mohamd Malas‘ classic The Night (al-Leil).

Content
In the destroyed city of Quneitra is the grave of a resistance fighter for Palestine. His son, the director, tries to restore the dead man’s history by mixing echoes of his mother’s memory and his desire to give his father a more honorable death. Through the daily lives, dreams, fears and hopes of its citizens, Malas chronicles his hometown Quneitra in the Golan Heights between 1936, the year of the first revolts against the British and Zionists in Palestine untill the year of the city’s destruction. He seeks to exorcise a feeling of shame and humiliation that long accompanied the image of his father and also his town, occupied by Israelis in 1967.
Syria 1992, color, wide screen, 116 min, Arabic with English or French subtitles

mec film is serving as agent to the films of renown Syrian film-maker Mohamad Malas. Together with Dunia Film in Damascus we make copies available or connect you to the distributor for your territory.
Mohamad Malas’ Œuvre, short and feature length, documentary and fiction, forms a deep chronicle of Syria in the 20th and early 21st century. We are happy to help organizing retrospectives of Mohamad Malas’ work.
--------------------------

4. HAUNTED – DVD with institutional or homevideo rights

Liwaa Yazji’s feature documentary HAUNTED is now available as DVD with institutional rights or as home video in the feature length version. Institutions who prefer the 63 min version for their educational work, can place their request with irit@mecfilm.de If you are working at an institution at the United States, please contact Torch Films

Content
“When the bombs fell, the first thing we did was run away. It was not until later that we realized we had not looked back. We were not allowed to say goodbye to our home, our memories, our photos and the life that was lived within them. We have become vacant like these spaces; our hastily packed belongings and the forgotten things haunt us.” An uncertain existence followed the escape and expulsion from Syria that tumbled into a physical and mental nowhere, a non-space between yesterday and tomorrow. “Haunted” tells of the loss of home and security, of the real and metaphorical meaning which a house, a home has in one’s life.
Liwaa Yazji, Syria 2014, 112 min, digital, Arabic with English, French, Spanish, Turkish or German subtitles
go to mecfilm-shop.com
------------------------------

5. publication

A TV-review of Feras Fayyad’s “The Last Men of Aleppo” by Irit Neidhardt (mec film) was published today in German and nation-wide newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. The film is broadcast on Arte this evening.
-----------------------------------
               

6. DVD of the month – LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES

Succint and powerful..... Film Comment

Like the politics it discusses, it is resolutely, and brilliantly, inconclusive. Time Out

Content
Occupied Palestine: A serene landscape now pockmarked by military checkpoints. When a Palestinian film crew decides to avert a closed checkpoint by taking a remote side road, the political landscape unravels, and the passengers are slowly taken apart by the mundane brutality of military occupation. Both a visual poem and a narrative, like twenty impossibles wryly questions artistic responsibility and the politics of filmmaking, while speaking to the fragmentation of a people.

I wanted to explore the reality of life under Israeli occupation and at the same time to question what it means to be an artist and filmmaker under these harsh realities where filmmaking is a privilege and where simple movement is a privilege. The fact that it's a film about a film is not only meant to critique the filmmaking process itself but also to show how memory and nostalgia (of the character of 'Anne-Marie') play a part in all this. I also wanted to comment on, or rather poke fun, at the tendency of filmmakers to appear in their own films, and somehow becoming the heroes of their own story.
In addition to exploring what it means to be an artist from an occupied country, I also wanted to ask questions about the very act of filmmaking itself. It seemed quite natural that just as the elements of film cannot work when separated from each other (sound, picture, the actor etc), so does the breakdown of communication and of unity amongst the crew of Palestinians themselves once they are separated from each other.
By the end of the film, the entire thing falls apart; with sound separated from image, the actor arrested, and the director leaving. I found that cinema was a perfect metaphor for what is happening in Palestine today and has been happening for the last 57 years. By the end of the film, because all the elements are town from each other - there is no film. There cannot be a film. (Annemarie Jacir, 2003)

Annemarie Jacir, Palestine 2003, fiction, short film, 17 min, Arabic/English/Hebrew
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish, German
PAL, region free

Awards (selection)
National Finalist, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Student Academy Awards
2003 Official Selection Cannes Film Festival - First Arab Short Film Selected for Cannes
Best Short Screenplay, Nantucket Film Festival
Best Film, Palm Springs International Short Film Festival
Best Short Film, IFP/New York
Best Short Film, Institute Du Monde Arabe Biennale
Best Short Film, Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival
Audience Choice Award, Polo Ralph Lauren Columbia Festival
Special Jury Prize, Ramallah International Film Festival
Audience Choice Award, San Diego Women Film Festival
Best Films of the Year list, 2003, Film Comment Magazine

Stream with our partners realeyz.tv

Institutional rights: according to the rights you wish to acquire and your territory the fee varies, please place your order at mec film

Go to mecfilm-shop.com