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A collection of experimental film and video art from the Middle East and North Africa. Featuring nine artists from a variety of cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, these intimate, poetic, and documentary works are witness to the region’s complexity, vitality, and diversity of creative energies. Distanced from the usual stereotypes, the artists aim to explore existential, political, and aesthetic issues of our time while opening up to new narrative perspectives that break with our media’s monotonous and repetitive imagery.
| Catalog Number: MC-782 |
Type: Shorts Compilation |
Genre: Experimental |
| Copyright: 2007 |
Length: 110 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC & PAL |
ISBN: |
UPC: 880198078292 |
| Label: |
Notes: Subtitles in French, English, and Dutch
Extras include interviews and biographies
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Films In Compilation
Nouba directed by
Katia
Kameli
Algeria,
Experimental,
2000,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:05:00
A traditional wedding scene behind a music video aesthetic that puts into play a potential tragedy. The film is based on a far-away and exotic reality in rythm to transglobal or universal music. Local images over global music.
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Straight Stories. Part 1 directed by
Bouchra
Khalili
Spain,
Experimental,
2006,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:10:00
Somewhere between documentary and fiction, this is an essay on questions of territory and human displacements made during an excursion from southern Spain to northern Morocco. Travelling on the Mediterranean rim, we hear immigrants tell their stories.
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Before Vanishing directed by
Joude
Gorani
Syria,
Experimental,
2005,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:13:00
In Before Vanishing, filmmaker Joude Gorani travels from the beginning to the end of the Barada river that surrounds the capital city of Damascus. Often deemed iconic of nature's wondrous beauty, we discover how the Barada river has suffered from exploitation, neglect, pollution and unplanned urbanization. The film also uncovers the transformation of the river's social life and provides an intelligent measure of the distance between ideology and reality, in contemporary Syria.
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Amer & Nasser directed by
Al
Fadhil
Iraq,
Experimental,
2003,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:05:00
How can one talk about death without showing the dead? Or, experience suffering without seeing the wounds? A possible answer is found in “Amer & Nasser”, a videogram excerpted from a documentary on the 1991 rebellion of Iraqi people, which turned into a bloodbath: the slow pace of the images allows us not really an observation, and investigation, of the two “martyrs“ identity, rather it poses the questions: „Why did it all happen“, and „Where were we“? The two blindfolded faces apparently emanate serenity and resignation, but they also hide a terrible anguish. The slow pace of time, this time, marks the steps of the sentenced ones, and the pushes and shoves of the soldiers, like it had lost its way. The obsessive slowing-down of the movement leads the mind’s way into the maze of the afflicted soul. In front of the camera-spectator, the passage of the brothers led to an army truck, while a somber flute announces the imminent trespass of life into death, looks like one towards the unknown in an unreal atmosphere.
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Don’t do to her what you did to me directed by
Zineb
Sedira
Algeria,
Experimental,
2001,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:09:00
The video Don't Do to Her What You Did to Me presents a kind of psychological ritual. A glass is filled with water. Behind it, a hand is seen writing "don't do to her what you did to me" on the back of four identical photographs. Black ink is then dropped in the water creating painterly effects as the ink dissipates. Next, the photographs are placed in the glass of water, where they are stirred vigorously with a metal spoon. The implement pauses occasionally, affording viewers a glimpse of the gradually disintegrating image of a woman's face. Finally, the artist drinks the mixture.
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I swam in the sea last week directed by
Nesrine
Khodr
Lebanon,
Experimental,
2003,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:02:25
I swam in the sea last week... is a symbolic and poetic video evoking a changing situation through female body swimming in the sea...
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Géographie Imaginaire directed by
Pauline
M’Barek
Tunisia,
Experimental,
2005,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:15:00
Géographie imaginaire is a subjective report on a deliberatly non-documentary, i.e. imaginary journey. Pauline M’Barek’s video is based on intimate obersevations that she made during the preaparations and traditional rites for her female cousin’s wedding in Tunisia.
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Saving Face directed by
Jalal
Toufic
Lebanon,
Experimental,
2003,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:08:00
Were all the candidates' faces posted on the walls of Lebanon during the parliamentary campaign of 2000 waiting for the results of the elections? No. As faces, they were waiting to be saved. Far better than any surgical face-lift or digital retouching, it was the physical removal of part of the poster of the face of one candidate so that the face of another candidate would partially appear under it; as well as the accretions of posters and photographs over each other that produced the most effective face-lift, and that proved a successful face-saver for all concerned. We have in these resultant recombinant posters one of the sites where Lebanese culture in specific, and Arabic culture in general, mired in an organic view of the body, in an organic body, exposes itself to inorganic bodies.
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Quelques miettes pour les oiseaux (A Few Crumbs for Birds) directed by
Nassim
Amaouche
Jordan,
Experimental,
2005,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:28:00
Rwuasched, a no man's land at the border. A little village at the frontier of Jordan and Iraq, invaded yesterday by journalists, deserted since the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Between the dilapidated houses, an unending procession of lorries thunder by. It is here that some “birds of passage” coming from Syria or Palestine have elected to settle : Sami sells jerry cans of petrol on the sly, Amer keeps a hotel where very young prostitutes offer their services to long-distance lorry drivers. With subtle touches – scenes of daily gestures, make-up sessions for the girls, evenings filmed in ‘night shots’ where adolescents lead the men on – Quelques miettes pour les oiseaux depicts a fragile universe, where time seems to have suspended its flight. On the sound track, a Palestinian song with tragic under-tones recounts the problems and disappointments of a man in exile : the most beautiful of songs, according to Amer, because it speaks of solitude, imprisonment, but also of hope – and, perhaps, recounts their own life. But this temporary survival is soon interrupted. The camera of Nassim Amaouche has attracted other more predatory birds : men from the authorities come to prevent the filming and direct the camera crew to tourist sites. After their visit, Sami’s little shop is closed, the hotel ransacked and turned upside down, the group of girls dispersed. A strange chronicle, that catches as if by unawares a few faces of a weakened population living on the margins of the conflicts in the Near East; an initiatory experience where the cinema becomes aware of its influence on reality.
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There currently are no reviews available
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