| March 2009
1) THE ONE MAN VILLAGE (Semaan Bil Day’ia): Middle East Distributor, Festivals, Award
2) I AM THE ONE WHO BRINGS FLOWERS TO HER GRAVE and LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES touring with Arte East
3) mec film services: Consultancy and Workshops
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1) THE ONE MAN VILLAGE (Semaan Bil Day’ia): Middle East Distributor, Festivals, Award
We are happy to announce that Metropolis in Beirut acquired the Middle East Distribution rights for Simon El Habre’s THE ONE MAN VILLAGE. For all request, bookings and TV acquisition in the Middle east, North Africa and the Gulf Region, please contact Hania Mroue
of Metropolis in Beirut.
After taking an award at Dubai International Film Festival and celebrating it’s European premiere at Berlinale THE ONE MAN VILLAGE continues travelling the world. Together with Simon El Habre the film has been at DoxBox Documentary Film Festival Damascus and at ARABESQUE Festival in Washington DC, next steps are International Film Festival of Mediterranean Cinema Tétouan (Morocco), Berlinale à Paris (France), Minneapolis - St. Paul International Film Festival (USA), Jeonju International Film Festival (Korea), Documenta Madrid (Spain), Visions du Réel Nyon (special program for the 10th anniversary of Eurodoc), International Documentary Film Festival Munich (Germany), and Arab Film Festival Rotterdam (in competition).
We are proud to announce that THE ONE MAN VILLAGE won the following Special Mention
at One World International Documentary Film Festival in Prague last Thursday:
“For his first time feature-length film Simon El Habre succeeded in sharing with the audience both a family history and an episode in the history of war-torn Lebanon. He did so with a sensibility to human faces and human words that create a seldom-seen vision of the Middle East.”
The Jury consisted of Gerd Kroske (Germany), Tonicka Jankova (Czech Republic), Marie-Pierre Duhamel (France) and Alexandru Solomon (Romania).
Short Synopsis
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.
Simon El Habre | Lebanon 2008 | 86 min | colour | Arabic with English ST
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2) I AM THE ONE WHO BRINGS FLOWERS TO HER GRAVE and LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES touring with arte east
Hala Alabdallah and Ammar Albeik’s award winning documentary I AM THE ONE WHO BRINGS FLOWERS TO HER GRAVE (Syria / France 2006) and Annemarie Jacir’s highly acclaimed LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES (Palestine 2003) are part of the ArteEast Film Tour-“Women's Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran” which is travelling the US and the Middle East between March and September 2009. As part of the first session I AM THE ONE WHO BRINGS FLOWERS TO HER GRAVE is screening at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive today.
Learn more about the tour.
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3) mec film services: Consultancy and Workshops
Irit Neidhardt of mec film offers consultancy for filmmakers and producers – mainly in the stage of development – as well as workshops
A Solid Basis for your Film
More and more film-makers from the Middle East finance their films with European money - some look for European co-production partners others apply for the funds for so called World Cinema. Competition is high. Under the pressure to find the best possible way to promote the project, people often get stuck with a bulk of confusing questions like: Do I have to explain my culture? What do Europeans want to hear or read? How can I protect my story? What are my rights in my film? How do I make a budget? What is the financing plan, and how can I know at this stage who will support me in the end? Why is the length of the film important? What is the difference between the one page synopsis and the treatment? And why do I need so many different texts for my application at all?
I believe that a project is strong when you remain faithful to your ideas. If you are clear about your strategy and if you have solid knowledge about the system in which you are going to produce, you provide a solid basis for your film. If you know where you stand and what you are looking for, you can negotiate on eye-level and keep control. This is the best way to protect your project and keep the energy and courage to go through the difficult process of making a film. continue
Irit Neidhardt was born in Germany in 1969 and brought up in Germany and Israel/Palestine; now she based in Berlin/Germany. Since 1995 she is teaching and curating in the field of Middle Eastern cinemas. She was managing an adult education centre in Germany and teaching (Hebrew) at SOAS (School for Oriental and African Studies) in London before founding mec film in 2002.
mec film (middle eastern cinemas) is a distribution and consultancy company for films exclusively from the Middle East. The German theatrical catalogue includes films like RANA’S WEDDING by Hany Abu Assad (Palestine), ROUTE 181 by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan (France/Belgium/GB/Germany), ATASH by Tawfik Abu Wael (Israel/Palestine) or NEWS FROM HOME by Amos Gitai (Israel/France/Belgium). In the World Sales mec film distributes Annemarie Jacir’s LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES (Palestine), Hala Alabdallah’s I AM THE ONE WHO BIRNGS FLOWERS TO HER GRAVE (Syria/France), Tawfik Abu Wael’s DIARY OF A MALE WHORE (Palestine), Dana Goldberg’s ALPHA (Israel) and others.
Irit is associate producer of Mahmoud al Massad’s award winning feature-documentary RECYCLE (Jordan/Netherlands/Germany/Switzerland/France/USA) and co-producer of Simon el-Habre’s THE ONE MAN VILLAGE (Lebanon). She worked as consultant for Tamer el-Said’s THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY (Egypt) as well as for the cinematic adaption of Sayed Kashua’s highly acclaimed novel LET IT BE MORNING (Palestine/France). continue
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