The Nakba is not just a past event but a continuous process that is still unfolding. To address the injustices of the present, we must confront the history that continues to shape and influence the present.
~Ilan Pappe

Posts

بچه‌های آسمان

Children of Heaven (1997)

Preview pic for post: Children of Heaven (1997)

Iranian cinema is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the Modern World. I'm in danger here of making this blog into something which it definitely is not trying to be, but let's pretend for a few minutes that this is a film blog...... If we're going to go there, it's a given that Iranian cinema was deeply influenced by Italian neorealism in the 1960s, and then something strange happened. While the rest of the world moved on and tried out new cinematic fads and trends, this intentionally naive realistic style became the living breathing identity of Iranian cinema...

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Lebanon - Pandora

Preview pic for post: Lebanon

Ziad Doueiri's 1998 film 'West Beirut' was quite the epiphany for me. Having for many years mentally pictured Beirut as a giant urban mantrap, with perfectly good reason given all the news that we were fed about the place throughout the 1980s, it was virtually impossible to visualise the lives of ordinary Lebanese people in the midst of the madness that engulfed them for fifteen years.

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Lebanon - Invasion

Preview pic for post: Lebanon

The format here is very simple. I'm going to discuss three Israeli films- 'Lebanon', 'Waltz With Bashir' and 'Beaufort' - about the invasion and occupation of Lebanon. These three films were actually made remarkably close to each other in time. The chronology of the films' production is in reverse order of the moments in history that they describe.

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כנפיים שבורות

Broken Wings (2002)

Preview pic for post: Broken Wings (2002)

This film is set in Haifa, Israel's third city, which has always been thought of as one of the more normal places in Israel, as far as "normal" goes anyway in that country. It's more mixed and more secular than either the Greater Tel Aviv area (taken as a whole) or Jerusalem. Buses mostly run on Saturdays, and the admittedly not so large Arab minority lives relatively harmoniously next to the Jewish majority.

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كستا برافا، لبنان

Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021)

Preview pic for post: Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021)

I don't know who I heard this from, or even whether I heard it at all from someone's mouth, but the saying goes that all roads to understanding the Middle East pass through Lebanon. It's just a throwaway cliché, but there's probably a lot in it. Younger readers won't remember the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, which was a defining world conflict for anyone with a developing political consciousness in the 1980s. That's me, then.

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