Families

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...

Lebanon - Pandora

16.03.2024 23:02

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.

כנפיים שבורות

Broken Wings (2002)

14.02.2024 23:00

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.

كستا برافا، لبنان

Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021)

14.02.2024 23:00

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.

واجب

Wajib (2017)

05.02.2024 23:00

Here I'm going to write about a film which is gentle and wistful, occasionally funny, and occasionally sad and touching. The beauty of this film lies in the fact that - despite not containing one single word of dialogue between either of the two protagonists and an Israeli character - there are more than enough references, oblique and acute, to reveal what it's like to live day to day as an Arab citizen in the Jewish State.

Families

بچه‌های آسمان

Children of Heaven (1997)

Lebanon - Pandora

כנפיים שבורות

Broken Wings (2002)

كستا برافا، لبنان

Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021)

واجب

Wajib (2017)