1. FROM CAIRO - New for international distribution and sales
2. ALEPPO, MAGAMS FOR PLEASURE in France
3. MY NAME IS NOT ALI in the UAE and in Germany
4. NATION ESTATE in Germany
5. 1982 NINETEEN-EIGHTY-TWO in Switzerland
6. WAJIB in Germany
7. text and event
8. DVD of the month - THE NIGHT
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1. FROM CAIRO - New for international distribution and sales

mec film is proud to add Hala Gala's award winning documentary about the lives and resilience of two single women in Cairo to he international distribution and sales catalogue. In November the film shows at the Medfilm Festival in Rome (Italy).

Content
In the streets of Cairo, documentary filmmaker Hala Galal moves purposefully and quickly. She presents a brave face, but she is in constant fear of being harassed (or worse) just for being a working single woman. Galal follows two women, Heba and Aya, who challenge the norms and limitations of women in Egypt with a completely different fearlessness.
Heba tries to find space in her life as a single mother and photojournalist to create art that, among other things, focuses on the existence of the female body. Although money is tight, her small home is always filled with laughter and the smell of home-cooked food. Meanwhile, Aya tries to find a foothold in her relationship with family, religion and passion for film. The contact sport of roller derby takes up more and more of her time, and the community and closeness to the other women on the team forces Aya to reconsider her position as a woman.
The women have a desire to create space for more voices and nuanced perspectives in Egypt. They live alone and work in art specifically, through which they find their way, achieve their dreams and find some happiness—regardless of the consequences.
documentary, Egypt 2021, 65 min, Arabic with English ST
more | trailer
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2. ALEPPO, MAGAMS FOR PLEASURE in France
Mohamad Malas' portrait of Sheikh Sabri Mudallal is invited the Festival International Jean Rouch in Paris (France) this November.

Content
Sheikh Sabri Mudallal (83 years) is the last of the Masters of Tarab reciting in Aleppo. The troupe (turath) he established is considered an oriental orchestra that maintains originality and purity, as far as singing, music processing and used instruments, are concerned.
According to Mudallal this kind of singing expresses the loyalty to the traditions of singing and the preserving of the classical school of Aleppo which is one of the main schools in oriental music. Although the education was based on religious reciting, many masters have revived and developed its basics in the beginning of this century, among them were, Sheik Ali Darwish, Omar Al Batch and Bakri Al Kurdi. Sheik Sabri Mudallal, a disciple of these masters, remains the witness and the keeper of this school. His memory and experience are a historical reference to all his predecessors.
documentary, Mohamad Malas, Syria 1999, 52 min, Arabic with French subtitles
more
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3. MY NAME IS NOT ALI in the UAE and in Germany

Viola Shafik's anti-biography about El Hedi Ben Salem shows in November at Cinema Akil in Dubai (UAE) and at FilmZ Mainz in Germany.

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
more | trailer
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4. NATION ESTATE in Germany

Larissa Sansour's Sci-fi was part of the short film program of the 1st Palestine Film Days Cologne (Germany) in early November.

Content
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 | clip
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5. 1982 NINETEEN-EIGHTY-TWO in Switzerland

Oualid Mouaness' multi-award winning feature is presented in the official program of the Arab Film Festival Zurich (Switzerland) in the end of November 2022.

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, Libanon/USA/Qatar/Norwey 2019, 100 min, Arabic with German subtitles
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6. WAJIB in Germany

Annemarie Jacir's multi-award winning feature showed on 5 November in the program of the Palestinian Film Days Cologne.

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
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7. text and event

Text
Irit Neidhardt's (mec film) text Palestine Fights: Behind the Scenes of PLO-GDR Cooperation in Filmmaking was just published in Viola Shafik's new anthology: Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa, The American University in Cairo Press, 2022.

Talk
For the opening of the 1st Palestine Film Days Cologne (Germany), Irit Neidhardt gave a short introduction to Palestinian Film-Making, followed by a short film program.
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8. DVD of the month - THE NIGHT

In the end, there are only fragments of memory, says the son. THE NIGHT pieces them together using a visual language of extraordinary potency, combining a range of oriental metaphors with intimate human portraits. Every day life and fortunes of a city and its people. All this and more is captured by the impressive cinematography. Like a cook at an eastern banquet, director Malas has concocteda rare feast of politics and poetry, with a unique spicing of piquant humour. (Berlinale Journal, 1993)

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.

DVD-Info
Mohamad Malas, Syria 1992, color, wide screen, 116 min, Arabic
subtitles: English
synopsis, credits, director’s biography
PAL, region free

Awards
Carthage Film Festival (Tunis) - Tanit d'Or for the Best Film 1992
Film Festival Fribourg (Switzerland) - Best Film 1993
Film Festival Brugge (Belgium) - Grand Prize for the Best Film 1993
Film Festival Valencia (Spain) - Silver Award 1993
Biennal du Cinémas Arabes (France) - Audience Award 1994

Institutional rights
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