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Newsletter May 2018

1. NEW! COUNTING TILES by Cynthia Choucair
2. ECCOMI … ECCOTI in Berlin, Calgary and Hamburg
3. AND AN IMAGE WAS BORN in Calgary
4. HAUNTED in Vienna
5. SOLOMON’S STONE in Doha
6. Larissa Sansour’s SCI-FI TRILOGIE in Nairobi and NATION ESTATE in Berlin
7. A WORLD NOT OURS in Berlin
8. VOD of the month: AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE
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1. NEW! COUNTING TILES by Cynthia Choucair

mec film is proud to have obtained the international distribution and sales rights for Cynthia Choucair’s feature documentary COUNTING TILES.
The idea for the film Counting Tiles came up when Sabine, the director’s sister and a professional clown, was at the Greek island of Lesbos in October 2015 as part of the Clowns Without Borders. By that time countless volunteers came to Lesbos to help welcoming the refugees. On November 29th, 2015 the EU and Turkey implemented the Joint Action Plan which’s main aim is to prevent migration flows to the EU.
When Cynthia Choucair and her film-team, together with a group of Clowns, arrived in Lesbos in February 2016 the situation was completely different: the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, had started its Operation Poseidon to strengthen the surveillance of the Greek maritime borders which leads to sight of huge vessels at the horizon and abandoned coasts. Those refugees who made it to Lesbos were imprisoned in Moria Registration Camp, unauthorized assistance to refugees was now punished and bulldozers had cleaned the beaches and piled up the live jackets into huge piles of rubbish.
We ended up being in the middle of nowhere, unsure of what we were even waiting for. I felt as if I was a refugee myself, my anxieties about war came back and I wanted to return home. But going back home meant returning to the memories of war and of our family being displaced from one place to another. All of these memories swirled in my head while I was filming the clowns waiting, and wondering…
When I was two years-old, my parents fled the civil war in Lebanon and went to Athens. Today, 40 years later, history is repeating itself, with different people and myself in that same place looking at it from a different perspective.
(Cynthia Choucair)
The film had its world premiere at Rotterdam International Film Festival and is invited to Sheffield Doc|Fest in June.

Content
In February 2016, a group of clowns travel to the Greek island of Lesvos on a mission to bring laughter to the waves of refugees crossing the sea to escape from war and enter Europe. Unwittingly, the clowns find themselves greeted with closed gates witnessing the effects of new policies enacted by the European Union towards the refugees.
Cynthia, the sister of one of the clowns, joins them on their journey which slowly becomes a reflection on the sisters’ own tale of displacement during the Lebanese civil war.
Moments of humor and joyful laughter bring the clowns back to their original mission, ironically playing with reality to a point where the lines between their clown personalities and their real selves are blurred.
documentary, Cynthia Choucair, Lebanon/Germany 2018, 87 min, Arabic with Engl. ST
more
extensive background information
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2. ECCOMI … ECCOTI in Berlin, Calgary and Hamburg

Raed Rafei’s feature documentary was presented earlier this month in at the Arab Film Festival in Calgary (Canada), followed by a Q&A with the director. The film is invited to the 13th XPOSED International Queer Film Festival Berlin which takes place form May 24th till 27th and shows at 27.5.2018 in the Arab Film Club of B-Movie in Hamburg (both Germany).

Content
With a lyrical, ambient soundscape set atop a dreamy, atmospheric visual style that oscillates between still photography and moving images, the film explores what it means to be gay in contemporary Beirut and the aches of psychic pain that blocks one from reaching a sense of “complete-ness” with one’s self. Does such in-completeness have to do, in particular, with being gay? Or is it related to a grander malaise endemic to the human condition?
documentary, Raed Rafei, Lebanon 2017, 68 min, color, Arabic/French/Italian/English with Engl. ST
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3. AND AN IMAGE WAS BORN in Calgary

Firas Khoury’s 9 minute reflection on storytelling and image creation was presented at the Arab Film Festival Calgary (Canada) last week.

Content
Palestinian two years old Razi loves to hear the story of The Monster. The story is an allegory of the Palestinian problem but he is too young to comprehend the political association, he just wants to imagine and live through its details over and over again. The narrator has his own film in his head.
short film, Firas Khoury, Palestine 2017, 9 min, Arabic with English or French ST
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4. HAUNTED in Vienna

Liwaa Yazji’s 2014 documentary film is still travelling festivals and institutions worldwide. Today the film is presented at the Ethnocineca - International Documentary Film Festival Vienna (Austria) in the presence of the director.

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.
documentary, Liwaa Yazji, Syria 2014, 112 or 63 min,  Arabic with English ST, several other languages are available
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5. SOLOMON’S STONE in Doha

Ramzi Maqdisi’s black-comedy short is presented this month at the first Palestinian Film Festival in Doha (Qatar).

Content
Hussein, a Palestinian young man, receives a letter from the Israeli post office to appear in person to receive a package. He has to pay the sum of 20.000 $ US dollars in order to collect that package. Hussein’s curiosity to find out what the package contains drives him to sell everything he owns, despite the outright rejection of his mother, the matter that changes their lives afterwards.
The story is adapted from the novel Blue Light by Hussein Barghouty.
short film, Ramzi Maqdisi, Palestine/Spain 2015, 25 min, color, digital, Arabic with Engl. or French ST
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6. Larissa Sansour’s SCI-FI TRILOGIE in Nairobi and NATION ESTATE in Berlin

The animated short-film trilogy by Larissa Sansour was on the 7th of May the trilogy is invited to the Cinemalliance program of the Alliance Francaise in Nairobi (Kenia). The middle part, NATION ESTATE, is presented on the 23th of May within the program Technologies of Violence at the Arsenal Berlin (Germany).

Content
Under the common themes of loss, belonging, heritage and national identity, the three films A Space Exodus (2008), Nation Estate (2012) and In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015) each explore different aspects of the political turmoil the Middle East.
While A Space Exodus envisions the final uprootedness of the Palestinian experience and takes the current political predicament to its extra-terrestrial extreme by landing the first Palestinian on the moon, Nation Estate reveals a sinister account of an entire population restricted to a single skyscraper, with each Palestinian city confined to a single floor. In the trilogy’s final instalment, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, a narrative resistance leader engages in archaeological warfare in a desperate attempt to secure the future of her people. Using the language of sci-fi and glossy production, Sansour’s trilogy presents a dystopian vision of a Middle East on the brink of the apocalypse.
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7. A WORLD NOT OURS in Berlin

Mehdi Fleifel’s multi-award-winning A WORLD NOT OURS showed on May 6th, 2018 at 7pm at the be'kech in Berlin.

Content
A World Not Ours is an intimate, humorous portrait of three generations in exile in the refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh in southern Lebanon. Based on a wealth of personal recordings, family archives, and historical footage, the film is a sensitive and illuminating study of belonging, friendship and family. Filmed over more than 20 years by multiple generations of the same family, A World Not Ours is more than just a family portrait; it is an attempt to record what is being forgotten, and mark what should not be erased from collective memory.
documentary, Mahdi Fleifel, GB/LB/UAE 2012, 93 min, DCP, Arabic/English with German ST
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8. VOD of the month: AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE

When the uprisings begun in Egypt in January 2011, Mohammad Shawky Hassan was in New York. His film is a text-image montage with empty apartments, lonely rooms, of views from windows and street scenes in New York and Cairo. In the background: an uninterrupted soundtrack of news and talk shows.
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. (Mohammad Shawky Hassan)
view online
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