| January 2012
1. New!! LEAVING BAGHDAD by Koutaiba Al-Janabi
2. Gate #5 by Simon El Habre available for festivals
3. Goethe Institute acquires rights of Viola Shafik’s MY NAME IS NOT ALI and screenings
4. Eyal Sivan’s films at mec film
5. DVD of the month: The One Man Village
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1. New!! LEAVING BAGHDAD by Koutaiba Al-Janabi
mec film is proud to announce the distribution of Koutaiba Al-Janabi’s award winning feature length fiction LEAVING BAGHDAD, which Empire magazine calls “a chilling insight into the nightmare of having to live with the consequence of one's actions.”
Content
Baghdad in the early 2000s: Sadik, a personal cameraman to Saddam Hussein escapes Iraq. Hoping to join his estranged wife in London, he traverses several countries, is passed on from one smuggler to the next. The disappearance of his son, who did not share his father’s enthusiasm for the regime, and scenes Sadik had filmed for work, haunt him alike whilst he tries to find his way out of the omnipresent and tormenting shadows of the regime.
As footage shot by fictional Sadik, Koutaiba Al-Janabi weaves real footage from Saddam Hussein’s now accessible archive into his documentary style, slow paced fiction.
Koutaiba Al-Janabi, Iraq/UAE/UK 2010, 85 min, HDCAM, Arabic/Hungarian/English with English subtitles
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2. Gate #5 by Simon El Habre available for festivals
Simon El Habre’s second feature length documentary GATE #5 successfully premiered Dubai International Film Festival and is now available for festivals. Please ask Irit Neidhardt for screener DVDs
irit [ at ]mecfilm dot de
Content
They were young, loved adventures and had choices. In the 1960s and 70s thousands of young Lebanese left their villages and searched for a new life in the city – as countless like-minded people around the globe. The port of Beirut, the city’s economic lung and central urban district, provided work for truck drivers - a job that stressed masculinity and became a lifestyle. The income allowed the young men to participate in the vibrant urban life, to enjoy their time at the always busy Burj Square with its many cinemas and restaurants as well as to start families.
During the years of the civil war (1975-90) the drivers were needed to maintain the supply of food, goods, and sometime weapons between the divided sectors of country. Some were humble, others were heroic, yet all were adventuresomeness and felt free.
After the war ended the once popular Burj Square, the city’s centre, was demolished, privatized and rebuild for the affluent. Lebanese economy was reorganized, thus globalized. Today fancy restaurants in the new downtown charge in Dollar and sometimes in Euro.
The truck drivers’ universe shrunk to the port where they offer their skills as day laborers now. Yet mostly they kill time and take long journeys in memory. One of them, Najm El Habre, is too sick to join his friends. He found a different way to carry on.
Simon El Habre, Lebanon 2011, 83 min, HDCAM, Arabic with English ST
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3. Goethe Institute acquires rights of Viola Shafik’s MY NAME IS NOT ALI and screenings
German Goethe Institute acquired the screening rights of MY NAME IS NOT ALI by Viola Shafik for presentations and discussions in the framework of the institute’s work. The film is available for festivals, institutional screenings and special events in cinemas.
Content
His anti-racist film Ali – Fear Eats Soul (1973) gained German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder international acclaim. The protagonist, an Arab foreign worker, was played by Moroccan El Hedi Ben Salem M’barek Mohammed Mustafa, Fassbinder’s lover at that time. While the film itself courageously deals with the racism of post-war German society, its makers reproduced the insensibility and invention of the Other, fantasizing their own ‘Salem’. Collage-like, through interviews and archive material, My Name Is Not Ali uncovers the invention of El Hedi Ben Salem by the Fassbinder troupe, an image not revised by most of its members till today.
Viola Shafik, Egypt/Germany 2011, 93 min, HDCAM, German/Arabic/French with English ST
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4. Eyal Sivan’s films at mec film
mec film and momento! are happy to announce their cooperation in distributing Eyal Sivan’s films. You can book his films through mec film, we are happy to consult in programming retrospectives on questions of archive, genocide, Palestine/Israel or others.
In 1987 Eyal Sivan presented his first film, Aqabat Jaber – Passing Through. As one of the first Israeli directors he attended to the situation of the Palestinians in the refugee camps that were established in 1948. Already in this work the award winning director laid the basis for his body of work, namely to look into various forms of political violence and collective memory. In his cinematic reflections Sivan refuses to nationalistic narratives and often turns his attention to perpetrators and followers, be it in his works on the impact of Zionism like in Izkor – Slaves of Memory (1991) or his latest Jaffa – The Orange’s Clockwork, in his essays on the genocides in Africa, Burundi, under Terror (1996) and Itsembatsemba, Rwanda one Genocide later (1997), with regard to the archive of surveillance in GDR in I Love You All (With Audrey Maurion, 2004), or in his seminal film The Specialist (1999) on the Eichmann Trail in Jerusalem, which was inspirational on numerous films on war crimes tribunals.
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5. DVD of the month: The One Man Village
A wonderful work, in every aspect. radioeins
A film full of poetry and simple worldly wisdom. Berliner Morgenpost
A film that goes under the skin. Al-Mustaqbal
It looks like, this film is the major cinematographic event of the year 2008 in Beirut. Al-Akhbar
Content
Semaan is leading a quiet life on his farm in the small village Ain el-Halazoun in the Lebanese mountains. The hamlet was completely emptied and destroyed in combats during the civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. Today, many years after an official reconciliation, its inhabitants which are all from one family regularly go back to the village to cultivate their plots of land or visit their houses and always leave before sunset.
In his comforting and humorous film Simon El Habre observes the life in his quasi ghost village and tries to reflect on the collective and individual memory in a country that seems to live in a collective amnesia and is vulnerable to a new civil war.
Lebanon 2009, Simon El Habre, documentary, 86min, Arabic
Subtitles: English, French, German, Serbian, Spanish, Italian
Bonus: Deleted Scenes, Sort-film, Making-Of
PAL, region free, on stock
Institutional rights: according to the rights you whish to acquire and your territory the fee varies, please place your order at info [ at ] mecfilm.de
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