1. NATION ESTATE wins in Marseille and shows in Ismailia, Rome and Guanajuato
2. FAMILY ALBUMS in Amman
3. FIDAI in German theatres
4. DVD of the month – LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES
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1. NATION ESTATE wins in Marseille and shows in Ismailia, Rome and Guanajuato

Larissa Sansour’s Sci-Fi short NATION ESTATE won the prize for the best short film of the critic’s jury at the 1st International Meetings of Arab Cinemas last week in Marseille. The film also showed at Ismailia Film Festival for Documentary and Short Films in Egypt. It is competing at MedFilm Festival in Rome at the end of the month and will be part of the experimental section of Guanajuato Film Festival in Mexico in August.

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.
Larissa Sansour, Palestine/Denmark 2012, 9 min, digital, Arabic with English subtitles
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2. FAMILY ALBUMS in Amman

The documentary compilation FAMILY ALBUMS with contributions from Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan and Palestine was selected to the Franco-Arab Film Festival in Amman where it is showing in the presence of Mais Darwazeh later this month. Mais Darwazeh is the director of THE DINNER, one of the short films in the compilation.

Content
The Arab World is a region in unrest. Today’s young generation of artists was born into conflicts who’s beginning they do not know and which seem not to end. They carry their parents’ exiles, traumas and lost hopes in them. In Family Albums four filmmakers draw up a sensitive portrait of that region.
In Kabylia, Nassim Amaouche digs with his father in the rubble of the family home bombed in 1957 searching for his father’s lost childhood or a new start between both men.
Erige Sehiri too, must rediscover her father. It seems that the Tunisian revolution and his new addiction to Facebook drove him away. He even left his family and went back to his small Tunisian village.
Ahmad, Sameh Zoabi’s childhood friend, is handsome, 35 years old and still single, a quite problematic situation in this little Palestinian village of northern Israel. As his mother gave up to find him a wife, Sameh takes over.
Mais Darwazeh lives in Amman, a city of uprooted people. She builds her identity by gathering around her table close friends, chosen ingredients, and old recipies.
Nassim Amaouche, Mais Darwazah, Erige Sehiri, Sameh Zoabi, France/Palestine/UAE 2012, 82 min, digital, Arabic/Berber/French/English with English, French or Arabic subtitles
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3. FIDAI in German theatres

Damien Ounouri’s feature length documentary FIDAI opened in German theatres in May. This month it is playing in Munich and Saarbruecken.

Content
During the Algerian revolution, my great-uncle joined his sister in France and integrated a secret FLN armed group. Settling of scores, attempted murder, hiding, imprisonment and finally expulsion in 1962, his personal journey tells the story of countless ex-fighters for Algerian independence, and echoes the current effervescence of the Arab World. Today, at the age of seventy, El Hadi reveals this dark part of his life.
Damien Ounouri, Algeria/France/China/Qatar/Kuwait/Germany 2012, 83 min
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4. DVD of the month – LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES

It was in May ten years ago that the first short film from the Arab world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Annemarie Jacir's short film LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES (Palestine 2003) had its world premiere as an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, making history as not only the first Palestinian short film in Cannes, but also the first short film from the Arab world at the renown festival.

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, shortfilm, 17 min, Arabic/English/Hebrew
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish, German
PAL, region free, on stock

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

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