1. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW online at Aflamouna
2. CHRONIC and ECCOMI ... ECCOTI online at Shasha Movies
3. DREAMS OF THE CITY in the USA
4. PASSION and THE NIGHT online from Abu Dhabi
5. New in German distribution: 1982 NINETEEN EIGHTY-TWO
6. GATE # 5 at Aflamouna
7. PANOPTIC in Italy
8. IN VITRO in Canada and France
9. EARSED,___ASCENT OF THE INVISIBLE in Taiwan
11. DVD of the month - SOLOMON'S STONE
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1. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW online at Aflamouna

Sarah Francis feature documentary shows in October at Aflamuna.

Content
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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2. CHRONIC and ECCOMI ... ECCOTI online at Shasha Movies

CHRONIC by Mohamad Sabbah and ECCOMI ... ECCOTI by Read Rafei show in the Octover/November program of Shasha Movies

CHRONIC
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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ECCOMI ...ECCOTI
Two men, two contrasting realities, and a quest for a shared future despite a world of physical and imaginary boundaries.
Eccomi ... Eccoti is a road-trip documentary that explores the depths of a transnational gay relationship in today’s world. Set between Lebanon and Italy, this essay film is a poetic collage of fragments from a personal archive of shared moments: still travel photos, ambient sounds and videos of everyday instances. Through conversations between the filmmaker and his partner, this film raises questions of love, commitment, familial trauma, European border restrictions, LGBT rights and ongoing persecutions all within the contours of a shimmering queer utopia.
documentary, Raed Rafei, Lebanon 2017, 68 min, color, Arabic/French/Italian/English with Engl. ST
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3. DREAMS OF THE CITY in the USA

Mohamad Malas feature fiction shows in October in the program RADICAL MODERNISMS: RETRACING ARAB AND NORTH AFRICAN HISTORIES curated by Peter Limbrick.

Content
When his father dies, Dib, his younger brother and their mother (Yasmine Khlat) move away from their hometown Quneitra to Damascus. The mother’s despotic father reluctantly takes them in and tries to force the mother to remarry. Overwhelmed by the magic of the city, Dib wants to discover everything and is full of dreams. His daily life is shaped by insults and punishments however. Dib grows up against a backdrop of the political upheavals of the 1950s (the end of the military dictatorship in Syria and the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Nasser’s taking of power in Cairo, Egyptian and Syrian unification in 1958) and loses his childish illusions in the face of such violence and brutality. The dreams of the city prove to be a nightmare. Mohammad Malas’ partly autobiographical debut film marked the transition to auteur cinema in Syria.
fiction, Mohamad Malas, Syria 1984, 130 min, color, Arabic with Engl. or French ST
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4. PASSION and THE NIGHT online from Abu Dhabi

Mohamad Malas' two feature fiction films are presented by CinemaNA Contemporary Arab Cinema, a program of Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi and the NYUAD Film and New Media Program starting October, 4th, 2021. A Q&A with the director will be recorded.

PASSION
Iman (Salwa Jamil), a devoted Umm Kulthoum fan, lives in Aleppo with her taxi driver husband and daughters, and her brother Rashid's daughter, Jumanah, She feels that she owes it to Rashid, a political prisoner, to make it as a singer; meanwhile, her uncle, nephews and even her brother spy on her, sure that her passion for singing is proof that she is having an affair.
Inspired by a newspaper announcement and set against the backdrop of the 2003 Syrian elections, with streets filled with demonstrators against the American Invasion of Iraq, Mohamed Malas's film is an intense and extraordinary study of contemporary Syrian society.
fiction, Mohamad Malas, Syria 2004, color, 100 minutes, Arabic with Engl. or French ST
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THE NIGHT
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. 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, Libanon/USA/Qatar/Norwey 2019, 100 min, Arabic with German subtitles
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6. GATE # 5 at Aflamouna

Simon El Habre's GATE #5 showed in September at Aflamouna. If you missed the film, you can watch it online or buy the DVD.

Content
They were young, loved adventures and had choices. In the 1960s and 70s thousands of young Lebanese left their villages and searched for a new life in the city - as countless like-minded people around the globe. The port of Beirut, the city's economic lung and central urban district, provided work for truck drivers - a job that stressed masculinity and became a lifestyle.
During the years of the civil war (1975-90) the drivers were needed to maintain the supply of food, goods, and sometime weapons between the divided sectors of country. Some were humble, others were heroic, yet all were adventuresomeness and felt free.
documentary, Simon El Habre, Lebanon/UAE 2011, 84 min, color, Arabic with Engl. ST
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7. PANOPTIC in Italy

Rana Eid's esseyistic documentary was invited to the Middle East Now Festival in Florence (Italy) for the end of September.

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.
In a rare case where the sound landscape of a film dictates the visual landscape, Panoptic is a depiction of the turbulent Lebanese past and the way society copes with trauma.
documentary, Rana Eid, Lebanon 2017, 69 min, Arabic with Engl. or French ST
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8. IN VITRO in Canada and France

Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind's dystopic short is invited to the WNDX Festival of Moving Image in Canada and the Palestinian Film Festival In Strasbourg (France) in October 2021.

Content
In Vitro is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above.
In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder, 70-year-old Dunia is lying in her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia comes to visit her. Alia is born underground as part of a comprehensive cloning program and has never seen the town she’s destined to rebuild.
short Sci-fi, Larissa Sansour & Soren Lind, Palestine/Denmark/UK 2019, 28 min, digital, picture ratio 1:2.66, Arabic with English subtitles
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9. ERASED,___ASCENT OF THE INVISIBLE in Taiwan

After winning the main award at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival this summer, Ghassan Halwani's essayistic documentary is travelling selected cinemas in Taiwan in October.

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
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10. IN THE FUTURE THEY ATE FROM THE FINEST PORCELAIN in Spain

Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind's Sci-Fi is presented at International Women's Film Festival in Valencia (Spain) in October.

Content
In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity.
A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain – suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilization. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands.
short Sci-fi, Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind, Palestine / UK / Denmark / Qatar 2015, 29 min, cinescope, color, Arabic with Engl. or French ST
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11. DVD of the month - SOLOMON'S STONE

Ramzi Maqdisi’s black-comedy short, “Solomon’s Stone,” could be considered a parable of present-day Jerusalem and the nationalistic politics fueling the violent dynamic between Israel and the Palestinians, occupier and occupied. (Palestine Square)

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.

Product Details
Ramsi Maqdisi, Palestine 2015, short film, fiction, 25 min, Arabic
Subtitles: English
Synopsis, credits, director's biography
DVD PAL, region free

Subjects
Jerusalem, Myth, Oppression, Archaeology, Palestine, Comedy

Award
Audience Award for the Best Short Film at the Mizna Arab Film Festival

Institutional rights
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