1. ERASED,___ASCENT OF THE INVISIBLE awarded in France, showing in Italy, Tunisia, The Netherlands and Egypt
2. PANOPTIC awarded in Mexico, showing in Germany
3. COUNTING TILES in Canada
4. THE NIGHT in Spain and Germany
5. CHRONIC in Palestine and Germany
6. ECCOMI … ECCOTI in Germany
7. Larissa Sansour’s SCI FI TRILOGY in the UK
8. SOLOMON’S STONE in Turkey
9. events
10. DVD of the month: LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES
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1. ERASED,___ASCENT OF THE INVISIBLE awarded in France, showing in Italy, Tunisia, The Netherlands and Egypt

Ghassan Halwani essayist documentary was awarded with the Prix Ulysse Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole at Cinemed Montpellier (France) for the best documentary film.
In November Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible shows it the international competition of the Festival dei popoli in Florence (Italy), at the Carthage Film Festival in Tunis, at the Paradocs section of IDFA (The Netherlands) as well as in the Critic Week Competition of Cairo International Film Festival (Egypt).

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 or French subtitles
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2. PANOPTIC awarded in Mexico, showing in Germany

Rana Eid's cinematic letter to her deceased father was honored with the DocsMX 2018 Award in the Human Latitudes Section in Mexico.
In November Panoptic is presented at the Studio im Hochhaus in Berlin (Germany).

Content
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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3. COUNTING TILES in Canada

Cynthia Choucair’s timely feature documentary shows in November at the renown documentary film festival RIDM in Montreal (Canada).

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 2018, 87 min, Arabic with Engl. ST
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4. THE NIGHT in Spain and Germany

Mohamad Malas' seminal feature fiction The Night (al-Leil) is presented in Barcelona (Spain) at the Mostra de Cinema Àrab i Mediterrani de Catalunya, running from November 8th till 18th 2018. On December 6th and 8th the film shows in the framework of the program Syria, mon amour at the Kinemathek Karlsruhe (Germany).

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 until 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.
fiction, Mohamad Malas, Syria 1992, color, wide screen, 116 min, Arabic with English or French subtitles
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5. CHRONIC in Palestine and Germany

Mohamed Sabbah's feature fiction is showing this month at Well Played – Arab Film Days Heinrich Böll Stiftung Berlin (Germany) with this year’s title Hidden Life, Hidden Love - Self-determination and discrimination in the Arab World in the presence of the director as well at the Kooz Queer Film Festival in Haifa (Palestine).

Content
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.
feature fiction, Mohamed Sabbah, Lebanon/Germany 2017, 89min, Arabic with Engl. ST
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6. ECCOMI … ECCOTI in Germany

Raed Rafei’s road movie is presented at the Well Played – Arab Film Days of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Berlin (Germany) with the title Hidden Life, Hidden Love - Self-determination and discrimination in the Arab World.

Content
Eccomi ... Eccoti unfolds as a virtual road trip navigating between Italy and Lebanon. Conditioned to live in a long-distance relationship with his partner because of strict European visa regulations, the director patches together the moments shared together in an attempt to create a possible day-to-day reality for their couple.
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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7. Larissa Sansour’s SCI FI TRILOGY in the UK

The Sci-fi Trilogy by Larissa Sansour continues travelling, in November it shows at the London Palestine Film Festival (UK).

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.

All three films are distributed by mec film, you can book them individually or as package.
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8. SOLOMON’S STONE in Turkey

Ramzi Maqdisi black comedy short shows in November at the Malaty Film Festival in Turkey.

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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9. events

22.11.2018 @ 19.00 at the Kinemathek Karlsruhe (Germany)
Short opening lecture by irit Neidhardt (mec film) of the film series Syria, mon amour (in German). more

29.11.2018 @ 19.00 at the Studio im Hochhaus, Zingster Strasse 25, 13051 Berlin
Short lecture by Irit Neidhardt (mec fim): The Civil War in the Contemporary Lebanese Cinema (in German), followed by a screening of Rana Eid's feature documentary Panoptic (Lebanon 2017, with English subtitles. more

more info on events here
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10. DVD of the month: LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES

Succinct and powerful..... (Film Comment)
Like the politics it discusses, it is resolutely, and brilliantly, inconclusive. (Time Out)

by the director of The Salt of this Sea and When I Saw You

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.
Annemarie Jacir, Palestine 2003, fiction, shortfilm, 17 min, Arabic/English/Hebrew
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish, German
PAL, region free

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
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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