Screening formats available: 35mm
Screening fees: $350

Nadia, a young Moroccan emigre, returns from Paris to Fez to visit her dying father. At his funeral, she is overcome by the voice of Karina chanting the Koran. A powerful friendship develops between the two women as they decide to turn the father's palace into a Muslim women's shelter. A Door to the Sky is a Sufi tale told in a metaphoric language. It is also the first North African film to address the social and economic changes as proposed by a spiritual Muslim woman on a quest to preserve her cultural and religious identity

Screening formats available: 35mm and DVD
Screening fees: $400 for 35mm and $350 for DVD

Caramel is a deliciously indulgent and intimate account of five women working together in a beauty parlor. Beautiful Layal is oblivious to the gaze of a local admirer and instead fixates on a married man.  Nisrine will soon be married but is afraid her fiancé will discover he isn’t her first lover. Rima has designs on one of her stunning, dark-haired customers. Jamal is an aspiring actress and is refusing to grow old, while ageing Rose is overwhelmed when she discovers true love for the first time.  As the women from different generations share in each other’s experiences and emotions, the beauty parlor becomes a colorful hub of friendship and wisdom. Caramel weaves a delicious tale of life and is as sweet as it’s title.

In 1974, under the “Family Reunion” law, the French government decided to allow the families of Algerian men working in France to legally emigrate to join them. Inch’Allah Dimanche tells the story of one such family. After a tearful good-bye to her friends and family in Algeria, Zouina (Fejria Deliba) arrives in France with her three children and moves into a house that her husband has rented for them, filled with the hopes and promises of a new life. However, Zouina’s husband Ahmed fears that his wife’s honor may be threatened in this foreign society and subsequently forbids her to leave the house.

A story of friendship, courage and a politically naive man’s transformation into someone painfully aware of the social realities in contemporary Turkey… Mehmet and Berzan, two young men from different regions of Turkey bond together as lower-class citizens in Istanbul. When Mehmet is unjustly arrested, his frightened roomates evict him and he loses his job. Mehmet’s loyalty to Berzan will eventually force him to disregard an uncompassionate bureaucracy and embark on a journey eastward across Turkey.

Screening formats available:  35mm and DVD
Screening fees: $400 for 35mm and $250 for DVD

Screening formats available: DVD
Screening fees: $150

Please be informed that the DVD copy was produced from an old print

Returning to her native region 15 years after the end of the Algerian war, Lila is obsessed by memories of the war for independence that defined her childhood. In dialogue with other Algerian women, she reflects on the differences between her life and theirs. In lyrical footage she contemplates the power of grandmothers who pass down traditions of anti-colonial resistance to their heirs. Reading the history of her country as written in the stories of women’s lives, Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des Femmes du Mont-Chenoua is an engrossing portrait of speech and silence, memory and creation, and a tradition where the past and present coexist.

The poignant story of a young girl coming of age in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. It is through the eyes of precocious and outspoken nine-year-old Marjane that we see a people's hopes dashed as fundamentalists take power -- forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands. Clever and fearless, she outsmarts the "social guardians" and discovers punk, ABBA and Iron Maiden. Yet when her uncle is senselessly executed and as bombs fall around Tehran in the Iran/Iraq war, the daily fear that permeates life in Iran is palpable.

Screening formats available: DigiBeta and DVD
Screening fees: $200

Samira's goal is to find a husband. A real husband. Her father had found someone -- a widowed farmer with no family. But Samira quickly discovers that her husband is impotent. He only agreed to the marriage to satisfy social protocol and to have her function as a governess to his nephew Farouk and as a nurse for his elderly father. The absence of any affection or sexual interest on the part of her husband becomes intolerable for Samira and she begins to take refuge in daydreaming and fantasizing. Slowly, her interest in Farouk begins to acquire a less platonic character: Farouk responds to her advances and the two engage in a torrid affair. Samira's husband gets wind of their relationship and immediately expels his nephew from his household despite Samira's entreaties. Once again Samira finds herself isolated...

Screening formats available:
Screening fees: $450

This film is a part of the Global Lens 2009 film tour. You can contact us to arrange for a screening.

In director Randa Chahal Sabbag's ‘fairytale for troubled times,’ sixteen-year old Lamia must cross a border checkpoint between Lebanon and Israel to marry a man she has never met. Neither she nor her betrothed are eager to consummate a marriage to a stranger—a matter further complicated by Lamia's surprising admission that she is in love with the Israeli soldier guarding the border. Sabbag's enchanting drama about marriage and tradition is underscored by delicate symbolism and artful references to politics of Lebanon's territories that have been annexed.

Screening formats available: 35mm and DigiBeta
Screening fees: $400 for 35mm and $250 for Digibeta

Twenty-five year old Alia (Ghalia Lacroix) is fed up with singing at marriages to entertain the guests. The news of the death of Prince Sid'Ali, an ex-Bey, brutally returns Alia back to her past. At the funeral, she revisits the Palace where she spent her childhood and adolescence. Her mother was a servant in the Palace and her father unknown. The dilapidated state of the Palace distresses Alia. While she wanders through the deserted corridors, images - both fascinating and cruel - come back to mind from her childhood.

Zeinab watches her husband leave the country to go in search of clandestine work in Europe the day after their wedding. While she is waiting for her husband to return, she lulls the fetus of her unborn child to sleep, a social practice widespread throughout the rural world of North Africa. Yasmine Kassari’s beautifully shot debut is a moving and sensitive depiction of women’s lives in rural Morroco and their quiet hopes, dreams and expectations.

A hilariously captivating film following 13-year-old Nejmia who flouts custom and refuses to wear a veil. Nejmia plays in the streets with boys, rides a bicycle, a scooter, and generally does whatever she likes. She is cursed, ridiculed, and threatened, but, is buoyed by an indomitable spirit she perseveres with incredible good humor and a sense of perspective.

Hiba Bassem, a young woman from Kirkuk, returns to Baghdad after the war to finish her film studies at the Institute of Fine Arts. In Kirkuk, the Arab Hiba and her family had lived in harmony with the Kurds, but the war had changed all that and prompted the move to Baghdad. She is in the first class of film and TV students to submit their graduation films. The film is a diary of her year, as she struggles to finish her studies in the semi-destroyed city of Baghdad, find a place to live, find a job, deal with family problems and above all survive. This film has won a New Horizon Silver Award at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival in Doha in 2006, and a Golden Award at the Rotterdam Arab Film Festival in 2006.

“Yesterday we were thirteen, today we are fifty: days just go by…”. Bitter Water is a feature-length documentary about 4 generations of refugees in a Palestinian camp in Beirut.  For 54 years and over four generations, Palestinian refugees have lived in UN camps. Bourj El Barajneh, a refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, is home to 20,000 Palestinians who survive with no prospect of returning to Palestine, emigrating or assimilating into Lebanese society. The link with the past is fraying, and older people are trapped in a memory of a Palestine that younger people doubt they will ever see. They just want to escape. The camp is permeated with a sense of loss: “The vial of patience has been exhausted but for a single drop of bitter water and drink it I must…”

Conceived as a summation of life’s postponed projects, this beautifully shot black-and-white film is a monument to humankind’s great resilience and love of life in the face of loss, exile and death. Interviews with three Syrian women living in exile alternate with various footage: the desolate island of Arwad; paintings by the filmmaker’s husband; the husband’s emotional return to Syria to see his mother after 24 years; and an interview with painter and icon restorer Elias Zayat. Part documentary, part fable, this is a well-crafted, highly emotional tribute to the rejuvenating power of poetry and beauty in general, and in particular to Daad Haddad, a Syrian poet who disappeared in 1991.

Screening formats available: Beta SP and DVD
Screening fees: $300

In this seminal documentary, a triptych of stories spells out the painful fate of two generations of Maghrebi immigration to France. First we meet the men who left North Africa to forge their way in the paradise of France, only to discover that their paradise is one built of mud and tin roofs; then, the lives of the women who fared little better when they came to join their husbands struggling in this sad poverty. Finally come the stories of the children whose identity is blurred and forgotten as the pervasive French culture absorbs their Arab heritage.

When her young nephew hears a sermon in Cairo encouraging religious war, Nadia Kamel, long-time assistant to the legendary Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, takes it upon herself to acquaint him with the history of his maternal grandmother Maria (Naela). Incorporating footage of visits by Maria and her husband to relatives in Italy, Israel, and Palestine, this documentary tells the story of a remarkable woman who is part Jewish, part Christian, part Muslim—and all at once a feminist, a communist, an Italian and an Arab. Her history poignantly reveals the tensions and disfigurements brought about in a culture forced to accommodate the arbitrary boundaries of politics. A tale of humanity, tolerance, and diversity.

In 1989, at the age of twenty-one, the young Lebanese woman Souha Béchara attempted to assassinate General Antoine Lahad, who was collaborating with the Israeli Army in the South of Lebanon.

Screening formats available: Beta SP (Pal) and DVD
Screening fees: $125 + $40 for bank transfer fees

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are active as filmmakers, artists and university instructors. Their collective oeuvre comprises books, photo and video installations, short films and one feature film. A copy of this film, entitled Around the Pink House, disappeared in Yemen in 2000 under mysterious circumstances, on precisely the tenth anniversary of the unification of North and South Yemen. Hadjithomas and Joreige became intrigued about the incident because cinema is of hardly any significance in Yemen. They began a search for the truth about what had occurred, and recorded their experiences in El Film El Mafkoud. Among other things, it reveals how the pair are confronted with the image which exists of them in Yemen, and with they status they have as Arab filmmakers.

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.

One Evening in July unfolds the battle between the society morals of a sixty year old bridal beautician and her empathy for a reluctant bride, who is plotting to murder her groom.

Screening formats available: Beta SP and DVD
Screening fees: $100

In the early 1970’, Mohamed brings over Fatiha and their two children to live with him in a French suburb. Mohamed continues to work and keeps to his routine closing the door with his key. His wife and two children find themselves prisoners in their own house. Fatiha invents original ways to communicate with the outside world.

Screening formats available: Beta SP and DVD
Screening fees: $50

The street scape of Broken Hill, "the accessible outback" country town of Australia, is seen from the viewing platform of a Lebanese reality. Houses, neat, some pretty, some with children playing in front collide with sounds remembered from so long ago, maybe from one of Beirut's many wars, maybe even from future wars.

One slow, hot afternoon in a neighbourhood built to be a utopian suburb for employees of the Palestinian Post Office now becomes a lawless no-man’s-land between occupied East Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Screening formats available: Beta SP and DVD
Screening fees: $75

A series of static frames of natural landscapes, each piece is a visual meditation; loop footage with no discernible beginning or end united by a desire to capture visions of serenity and simplicity.

15-minute video work, tacitly foreshadows Hatoum's evolution from the more subjective perspective of performance-based work to the sculptures and installations she has produced in the intervening decade. The video's key footage uses a visual screen of Arabic script -- taken from a series of letters between the artist and her mother -- that is superimposed over the filmed image of her mother taking a shower. The screen both frames and obscures her mother's body. In both the literal sense that it was made during a visit home, and in a broader sense as well, Measures of Distance is one of the few examples of Hatoum's work to employ direct reference to the artist's exiled condition. Hatoum, a Palestinian born in Beirut in 1952, was stranded in Europe at the outset of civil war in 1975 (the municipal airport in Beirut was closed for nine months), and decided to study art in London, where she has subsequently lived most of her adult life. In the video's soundtrack, as well as in the graphic image of text layered over flesh, Hatoum explores how degrees of proximity and separation can be conveyed by employing both concrete examples (her mother taking a shower), and more formal abstractions (text, paper, voices, a trip to Beirut).

Every Saturday at exactly 12 noon, air raid sirens are heard throughout the city of Linz. Emily filmed the city's main square, taken from an aerial perspective, one minute before noon and one minute after for the duration of her two-month stay at the OK Centrum in the fall of 2003. Each Saturday she recorded the city below and the the sounds of the sirens echoing throughout the city from the exact same position.

Philip Glass’s orchestration rhythmically underscores the ritualized movements of the funerary preparations and procession that are the film’s subjects. Neshat’s panoramic landscape provides an epic backdrop to the actions of figures who move from the ritual to the elemental, giving rise to dust, sticks, stones and fire, which form a metaphoric circle of life, death, and the hope of renewal. Magical.

The starting point of Replay (bis) is the idea of rupture in a time and place that are undefined. The story, which might have been experienced or dreamt, is repeated in various forms. The images appear as reminiscences of the past, as well as attempts to reconstruct a narrative. These attempts make room for one final long shot: A view of Beirut today, at the time of the dusk prayer; as if this last image, inducing contemplation, had become the filmmaker’s ultimate way of relating the story.

Saphir contrasts Sedira's re-encounter with the sights and sounds of Algiers with an awareness that while she, like many other people from France, is enjoying her return to the city after the Algerian Civil War, some of its other residents, disenchanted young men in particular, often dream of escape across the water to Europe.

"The hands of the magician are faster than the eyes of the spectator."- Abdelouahid El Hamri, aka Sinbad of the Straits
This private display of illusions in the courtyard Mr. El Hamri's house in Tangier includes the apparition of ping-pong balls and white doves, swallowing razor blades, and an attempt to reproduce his difficult trick "How to Make a Chicken Go to Sleep (El sueno de un gallo)."