1. COUNTING TILES and PANOPTIC at Sheffield
2. ECCOMI … ECCOTI in Berlin
3. AND AN IMAGE WAS BORN in Pairs
4. Larissa Sansour’s SCI-FI TRILOGY in Berlin
5. THE DREAM in Aarhus
6. FREE RANGE in Berlin
7. MY NAME IS NOT ALI in Hamburg
8. Events
9. EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
10. DVD/VOD of the month: FREE RANGE
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1. COUNTING TILES and PANOPTIC at Sheffield

Cynthia Choucair’s COUNTING TILES and Rana Eid’s award-winning PANOPTIC are both presented at the program The New Lebanon at Sheffield Doc|Fest which is running till June 12th.

Counting Tiles
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
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extensive background information

Panoptic
Panoptic is a letter from a daughter to her deceased father in an attempt to reconcile with her country’s turbulent past.
Panoptic delves into Beirut’s underground to explore Lebanon’s schizophrenia: a nation that thrives for modernity while ironically ignoring the vices that obstruct achieving this modernity.
While the Lebanese population has chosen to turn a blind eye to these vices, Rana Eid, an ordinary citizen, explores the nation’s paradoxes through sound, iconic monuments and secret hidings.
documentary, Rana Eid, Lebanon 2017, 69 min, Arabic with Engl. or French ST
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2. ECCOMI … ECCOTI in Berlin

Raed Rafei’s feature documentary will be presented at the Beyond Spring film series in Berlin on June 14th at the Werkstatt der Kulturen. The program is a cooperation between Mayadin al Tahrir and EUME.

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 Pairs

Firas Khoury’s 9 minute reflection on storytelling and image creation is part of the competition of the Arab Film Festival in Paris which starts on June 28th.

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. Larissa Sansour’s SCI-FI TRILOGY in Berlin

The animated short-film trilogy by Larissa Sansour EU was shown at the conference Imagining the Future: The Arab World in the Aftermath of Revolution that took place in June 9th & 10th at the Archive Kabinett in Berlin. The conference is organised by AFAC and EUME.

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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if you cannot be in Berlin, view online with realeyz
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5. THE DREAM in Aarhus

Mohamad Malas’s seminal documentary THE DREAM will be presented at the Syrian Cinema Day at European Cultural Capital Aarhus (Denmark) at the end of this month.

Content
Shot in 1980-81, the film is composed of interviews with different Palestinian refugees including children, women, old people, and militants from the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila, Bourj el-Barajneh, Ain al-Hilweh and Rashidieh in Lebanon. In the interviews Mohamad Malas questions them about their dreams at night. The dreams always converge on Palestine: a woman recounts her dreams about winning the war; a fedai of bombardment and martyrdom; and one man tells of a dream where he meets and is ignored by Gulf emirs. During filming Malas lived in the camps and conducted interviews with more than 400 people. In 1982 the Sabra and Shatila massacres occurred, taking the lives of several people he interviewed, and he stopped working on the project. He returned to it in 1986 and edited the many hours of footage gathered into this 45 minute film, released in 1987.
documentary, Mohamad Malas, Syria 1987, 45 min, Arabic with Engl., German or French ST
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6. FREE RANGE in Berlin

Bass Bréche’s short film showed on June, 9th at the Long Night of Science at the university of Berlin in the program "(Re)Negotiating Boundaries and Borders in Muslim Cultures and Societies", in cooperation with ALFILM, the Arab Film Festival Berlin.

Content
Based on actual events, Free Range is the story of a cow that crosses the border from Israel to Lebanon and meets with 16 year old Malakeh and her family. A  Lebanese Spaghetti-Western that talks about borders and power between people, religions, cows and UN interventions.
short film, Bass Bréche, Lebanon/Germany 2014, 16 min, digital, cinescope, Arabic with Engl. ST
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7. MY NAME IS NOT ALI in Hamburg

Viola Shafik’s anti-biography of  El Hedi Ben Salem M'barek Mohammed Mustafa is showing on June, 17th in the Arab Cinema Club at B-Movies in Hamburg.

Content
His anti-racist film Ali, Fear Eats Soul (1973) gained German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder international acclaim. The protagonist, an Arab foreign worker, was played by Moroccan El Hedi Ben Salem M'barek Mohammed Mustafa, Fassbinder's lover at that time. While the film itself courageously deals with the racism of post-war German society, its makers reproduced the insensibility and invention of the Other, fantasizing their own 'Salem'. Collage-like, through interviews and archive material, My Name Is Not Ali uncovers the invention of El Hedi Ben Salem by the Fassbinder troupe, an image not revised by most of its members till today.
Documentary, Viola Shafik, Egypt/Germany 2011, 93 min, German/Arabic/French with English ST
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8. Events

mec film’s Irit Neidhardt was panelist at The Circulation of Palestinian and Arab Cinema in Europe - at the Festival Ciné-Palestine Industry Days
From art house cinemas to festivals and to alternative exhibition venues, the panelists will discuss their experience of distributing, curating and programming independent Palestinian and Arab cinema in Europe.
Speakers: Béatrice Grossi - Programmer - Cinéma Le Studio, Irit Neidhart - Distributor, mec film, Christophe Postic - Co-Artistic Director of Les États généraux du film documentaire de Lussas
Moderator: Mélanie Simon-Franza - Distributor, Juste Doc
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On June 24th, 2018 Irit Neidhardt is giving a lecture Jerusalem, Jeruschalajim, al-Quds  - On the Roots of Palestine-Images in the European Everyday Culture (in German) in Cologne (Germany). The talk deals with still photography and films made about Palestine since the mid-19th century. An event organized by Café Palestine-Cologne.
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9. EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

At regular intervals we send out a newsletter about the program and activities of mec film.
On 25th May 2018, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. We would like to continue to keep you up to date in the future.
We use your personal data (e-mail address only) exclusively for sending our newsletters, which are sent via the Chimpmail (till June, from July via kulturkurier.de) platform which also declares that it meets the requirements of the GDPR (see here www.eugdpr.org/). According to the rules of the GDPR, we never share, give or sell these informations to third parties.
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10. DVD/VOD of the month: FREE RANGE

Based on actual events, Free Range is the story of a cow that crosses the border from Israel to Lebanon and meets with 16 year old Malakeh and her family. A  Lebanese Spaghetti-Western that talks about borders and power between people, religions, cows and UN interventions.
short film, Bass Bréche, Lebanon/Germany 2014, 16 min, digital, cinescope, Arabic with Engl. ST

The director about the film   
"Free Range" is the story of an impecunious Lebanese family living on the border with Israel, a neighbor country that they learned to loathe and fear over the years.  When an Israeli cow surprises the family with an unexpected visit, the family has no choice but milking her, regardless of where she is coming from; hence committing an unforgivable act of disobedience to their local authority and ultimately there is a price that they have to pay.
In Southern Lebanon, the difference is huge between a cow and an Israeli cow, especially to the authorities on both sides of the border. Those who possess their power from the politics of fear they've embedded over the past decades and who continue to spread by any means. A manufactured fear; the fear from the other.
Looking into this family's life at the border, it's a common story not only in Lebanon but in many conflict zones around the world. Land-mines ravage the fields, and the victims are always ordinary people who end up as bystanders in their own lives. Watch themselves torn apart and live observing their slow death. They are the ultimate victims of this manufactured fear.
"Free Range" is a simple but yet a complex story that deals with various topics ranging from borders to cultures, religion, power and politics, and how they mix, merge and match subliminally in the life of ordinary people. (Bass Bréche)
Buy DVD
watch online with MMedia (Beirut) or realeyz (Berlin)
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