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Newsletter August 2021

1. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW and BIRDS OF SEPTEMBER in the USA
2. ERASED,___ASCENT OF THE INVISIBLE online worldwide
3. MY NAME IS NOT ALI at online North African Queer Film Festival
4. mec films at Shasha Movies
5. New in German distribution: 1982 NINETEEN EIGHTY-TWO
6. WAJIB in Freiburg, Berlin and as German DVD
7. SOLOMON'S STONE in Switzerland
8. LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES and NATION ESTATE in Germany
9. mec film's Annual Closing
10. DVD of the month - CHRONIC
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1. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW and BIRDS OF SEPTEMBER in the USA

Sarah Francis feature documentaries show in August at the Twin City Arab Film Festival in the USA.

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
A group of people roams in a bare landscape around a set of swings as their only settlement, as if mapping, exploring, reorganizing the open territory they are in. As they move, changes in soundscapes make them virtually cross geographies. In the sky, a moon-like satellite roves above their heads, following them like an omen. The moon, once symbolizing cyclical times, myths and new beginnings, is now the satellite waiting to be conquered and colonized. Reality and fantasy intertwine in an existential quest. Is a new beginning really possible? As below, so above.
documentary, Sarah Francis, Lebanon 2020, 70 min, b&w and color, Arabic with English subtitles
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BIRDS OF SEPTEMBER
A glassed van roams the streets of Beirut, home to a camera that explores the city behind the glass. Along the way, several people are invited to share a personal moment in this moving confessional. Each one comes as a face, a body, a posture, a voice, an attitude, an emotion, a point of view, a memory. Their confessions are true, blunt, and intimate. However, soon enough, the van empties again, and roams Beirut; restlessly looking for something, for someone.
documentary, Sarah Francis, Lebanon/Qatar 2013, 99 min, digital, Arabic with English or French subtitles
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2. ERASED,___ASCENT OF THE INVISIBLE online worldwide

Ghassan Halwani's documentary is part of the August Aflamouna program Filming Catastrophe and is online for one week without geo-blocking. Please consult the Aflamouna website for the dates.

Content
Thirty-five years ago, I witnessed the kidnapping of a man I know.
He has disappeared since.
Ten years ago, I caught a glimpse of his face while walking in the street, but I wasn’t sure it was him.
Parts of his face were torn off, but his features had remained unchanged since the incident. Yet something was different, as if he wasn’t the same man.
essay-documentary, Lebanon 2018, color and black & white, 76 min, Arabic and English with English subtitles
more
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3. MY NAME IS NOT ALI at online North African Queer Film Festival

Viola Shafik's anti-biography of El Hedi Ben Salem is showing in August at the online edition of the North African Queer Film Festival.

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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4. mec films at Shasha Movies

DRY HOT SUMMERS by Sherif Elbedary
FREE RANGE by Bass Bréche and
ON A MONDAY by Tamer El Said
show throughout August online at Shasha Movies in the program Comedy and Political Satire.
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5. New in German distribution: 1982 NINETEEN EIGHTY-TWO

mec film is proud to announce, that Oualid Mouaness' multi-award winning feature will open in German cinemas on November, 4th, 2021.

Content
In June of 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, a country just north of its border was already reeling from its ongoing fractious war.  In this feature debut, director Oualid Mouaness revisits this cataclysmic moment in Lebanese history through a different lens: a kid's point-of-view at a quaker school on the outskirts of Beirut.  As the geopolitical conflict inches closer and closer, 11-year-old Wissam (Mohamad Dalli) is more intent on finding the courage to tell his classmate that he loves her.  For a dreamer like Wissam, who is more likely to be drawing than playing football, it's hard to comprehend the gravity of the impending violence.  But for his teachers, Yesmine (Nadine Labaki) and Joseph (Rodrigue Sleiman), the jets in the sky signal something far more dangerous.  As they try to mask their growing fears for the sake of the students, they also attempt to hide the fractures in their relationship. They fall on different sides of the political divide and look a way to reconcile a relationship that seems irreconcilable due the nature of the war besieging the country they love.
Fiction, Oualid Mouaness, Lebanon/USA/Qatar/Norway 2019, 100 min, Arabic with German subtitles
more
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6. WAJIB in Freiburg, Berlin and as German DVD

Annmarie Jacir multi-award winning feature opened the Open Air Film Festival in Freiburg in theend of July and shows on August 12th in the Arab Cultural House - The Divan in Berlin. The German DVD is available now at the mec film online-shop.

Content
Abu Shadi is a divorced father and a school teacher in his mid-60s living in Nazareth. After his daughter’s wedding in one month he will be living alone. Shadi, his architect son, arrives from Rome after years abroad to help his father in hand delivering the wedding invitations as per local Palestinian custom. As the estranged pair spend the day together, the tense details of their relationship come to a head challenging their fragile and very different lives.
fiction, Annemarie Jacir, Palestine/France/Germany/Colombia/Norway/Qatar/UAE 2017, 96 min, Arabic with German ST
more
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7. SOLOMON'S STONE in Switzerland

Ramzi Maqdisi's bitter sweet comedy was invited to the Palestine Film and Arts Festival Zurich (Switzerland) in August.

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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8. LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES and NATION ESTATE in Germany

LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES by Annemarie Jacir and NATION ESTATE by Larissa Sansour show on August 21st, 2021 in Cologne at the event Bethlehem between Art and Resistance.

LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES
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.
short film, Annemarie Jacir, Palestine 2003, 17 min, 35mm or digital, colour, Arab./Engl. with Engl. ST, various additinal languages available
more

NATION ESTATE
Nation Estate is a 9-minute sci-fi short offering a clinically dystopian, yet humorous approach to the deadlock in the Middle East.
The film explores a vertical solution to Palestinian statehood: One colossal skyscraper housing the entire Palestinian population - now finally living the high life.
short Sci-fi, Larissa Sansour, Palestine/Denmark 2012, 9 min, digital, no dialogue
more
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9. mec film's Annual Closing

Like each year, the mec film office is closed throughout August.
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10. DVD of the month - CHRONIC

Chronic ('A Shafir)
 
Beirut is a city where any person can experience loss at any moment . Walid lost his hope for love. May couldn't say goodbye to her lover. He died in the sea. Antoine was about to lose his own life.
Omar a photographer lost his male lover in an explosion. He casts the three and invites them to his studio, and together they express stories of sex, love and trauma in the city of Beirut. Visitor after visitor, chapter after chapter, Omar loses control and provokes danger.

"Chronic" was first of all born out of a need and an urge to do it, to write and to film it.
The film results from am accumulation of experiences and stories that I lived and heard in my life and as a citizen of Beirut. Beirut, as I see it and live it, is a city that makes you live with a constant feel, a chronic feel, of losing something or someone. I have always felt that I am on the edge of a big change, on the edge of falling. In the past few years, I went through different stories of loss: I lost a lover, I lost a grandfather and I lost, at some point, hope in Beirut, in Lebanon and in the big childhood dreams. Those experiences marked me hard, they changed the way I look at things and affected my daily and creation behaviors.
Omar and I resemble a lot. The process that Omar adapts in the film resembles my own process as a director and writer of Chronic. Omar followed what he felt, he needed to transmit sensations, to ask questions and to capture and archive stories, emotions and faces. This is exactly what pushed me to do "Chronic" so I can live this same journey through images and sounds.
From the idea till the last steps of the post-production, I tried to conceive the film in total freedom: I wanted to explore a free form and narrative construction. I rarely asked myself big questions of where the film is going. Scene after scene, dialogue line after dialogue line and shot after shot, the film ‘somehow’ constructed itself. From a deep feeling inside of me and with a big trust and connection with the crew and actors, we all went together on this “adventure” as I like to call it.
(Mohamed Sabbah)

DVD-Info
feature fiction, Mohamed Sabbah, Lebanon/Germany 2017, 89min, Arabic
Subtitles: English
synopsis, credits, director's bio
PAL, region free

Subjects
Lebanon, Diaspora, Beirut, Queer Cinema, Friendship, Love, Migration, Loneliness

Festivals
Beirut Cinema Days (Lebanon)
International Queer & Migrant Film Festival Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival (Tunisia)
QFest Split (Croatia)
Well Played - Arab Film Days Berlin (Germany)
Kooz Arab Queer Film Festival Haifa (Palestine)
Pink Life QueerFest in Ankara (Turkey)

Institutional rights
According to the rights you wish to acquire and your territory the fee varies, please contact us via mail.

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