Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers. Edited by Rasha Salti

Insights into Syrian Cinema offers a rare glimpse into how daring and visionary filmmakers created an intransigently independent cinema in spite of near-impossible conditions. This timely collection, the first English-language volume of its kind, presents critical essays and an historical overview of film production in Syria, while featuring words and texts from the country’s most critically acclaimed and internationally celebrated masters of cinema.

A humble but groundbreaking step, Insights into Syrian Cinema initiates a meaningful and long-overdue conversation between filmmakers and their audience worlds removed. First conceived as the conventional catalogue of a film program, "Lens on Syria: Thirty Years of Contemporary Cinema" which is currently touring North America and the Middle East, this collection evolved into a true showcase for the thoughts and reflections of the filmmakers. After ArteEast and Rattapallax Press recognized the rarity of books and primary sources on Arab and Syrian cinema in English the project was transformed and expanded to give voice chiefly to the filmmakers themselves, alongside critics and academics. Insights into Syrian Cinema features texts by those seasoned filmmakers who have earned recognition, praise and awards in Syria and worldwide for their stellar achievements and now finally gives them a proper presence in print.

As much memoir as film book, Insights into Syrian Cinema puts the filmmakers’ words first. Working closely with editor Rasha Salti, such luminaries as Omar Amiralay, Abdellatif Abdul-Hamid, Oussama Mohammad and Mohammad Malas proposed texts they deemed important in representing their views on their craft and suggested interviews they felt were particularly successful in fulfilling that task. Because filmmakers are not writers or academics, ultimately the collection of texts is diverse and unconventional. As such, these works convey more truthfully and acutely the state of mind, the poetic imaginary, the cultural and artistic idiom and the emotional universe of their authors. While by no means intended as a comprehensive primer on Syrian cinema, this collection maps the foundations of Syrian film as it verges on finally attaining the profile it so richly deserves. Inevitably, this collection aims to spark a wider interest in Syrian cinema and help provoke the publication of an all-inclusive conventional work.

190 pps., B&W photos, $15, ISBN-13: 978-1-892494-70-2 / LCCN: 2006924084
Insights into Syrian Cinema is available for purchase at http://www.rattapallax.com/aic_syria.htm