Back from the third round of MEIFF, Hani Mustafa follows a string of concern with the past in several of the Arab films screened there
Regional film events provide a rare opportunity to assess a large number of films from a particular part of the world at a particular point in time, and where possible register a single characteristic running through a large number of them. At the Middle East International Film Festival, which closed last Saturday, one idea informing the Arab films on the programme was concern with time: its passage, and the effect of its unfolding on people (or characters). Several films concerned themselves with history, whether to review a particular episode from the past or to engage with the beauty of times past. Such over-the-board interest in time might drive the critic to a rushed judgement to the effect that Arab cinema is digging up old glories or indulging in nostalgia for its own sake. Yet a fair number of the films on the MEIFF programme effectively eschewed such shallow nostalgia, opting for a serious probing of the past to make contact with their roots or to present an informed and profound view of the present.
One such film, which dealt with history deeply and with technical prowess, was The Time that Remains by the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, who managed to skilfully interweave the personal and the political — a formula he employed in his previous films, whether features or shorts. Suleiman’s cultural specificity — his status as an Arab Israeli — gives his films a contradictory flavour, a kind of dialectic present in all his works starting with his first short The Gulf War… What Next? Screened at the Ismailia Documentary and Short Film Festival in 1993, it presented a clear view of one Arab Israeli in exile, and his contradictory feelings on hearing (false) news that Saddam would be targeting Tel Aviv with Scud missiles. On the one hand, as a dispossessed Arab, he is excited; on the other, he is deeply concerned for his mother, who lives in Nazareth (a few kilometres away from Tel Aviv).
The Palestinian cause is routinely depicted in a clichéd and direct way by the vast majority of Palestinian directors and thereby makes for weak films. Yet as Suleiman demonstrated in Divine Intervention (which received the Grand Jury Award in Cannes 2002), it is possible to deal with the Palestinian cause in a human and artistic way — an approach he also took in The Time that Remains, which featured in the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival this year and received the Best Middle East Film Award at MEIFF.
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