Middle East - Anthony Ham [64]
Apart from the daily difficulties of maintaining a Palestinian film industry, some directors have fallen foul of Israeli censors. In 2004 the Israeli High Court finally overturned a ban on Jenin, Jenin, a documentary film by Israeli-Arab filmmaker Mohammad Bakri, even as the court called the film a ‘propagandistic lie’. The film had been the first to be banned in Israel for 15 years. Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, about the last 24 hours of two Palestinian suicide bombers, was nominated for a Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar in 2005, but had to withstand a massive campaign in Israel against the film. These are rare cases, but a reminder that some directors are freer than others in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
Other Middle Eastern Countries
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Young Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, whose slick debut West Beyrouth (1998) is considered one of the best films about the Lebanese Civil War, was Quentin Tarantino’s lead cameraman for Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.
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The career of the French-based exile, Randa Chahal-Sabbagh, arguably Lebanon’s premier director, is a study in the bravery and endurance of Middle Eastern directors in the face of censorship. Her 90-minute, 1998 film Civilised, which encouraged the Lebanese people to stop blaming others for the war, was cut to just 43 minutes by Lebanese government censors. As a result, Chahal-Sabbagh refused permission for it to be screened in her native country. But she outlasted the government in question, won the Venice Festival’s Silver Lion award for her 2002 film The Kite (which portrays a young girl in a village on the Lebanese–Israeli border) and, for good measure, was even awarded the Order of the Cedar, Lebanon’s highest civilian honour, in 2003.
Turkey’s film industry, like Egypt’s, is reemerging strongly from the long decline that followed its 1970s heyday. In 2007, 40 Turkish films were produced, compared with over 300 in 1972. Perhaps more importantly for the health of the industry, the four most popular films in Turkish cinemas in 2007 were all home-grown.
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Filming the Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab world, by Lina Khatib, takes a look at both sides of the cinematic fence and includes coverage of films from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.
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Syria’s small film industry has produced some fine directors, despite the fact that the Syrian government’s Public Establishment for Cinema has only produced two films a year since 1969. Leading lights include Meyar al-Roumi, documentary filmmaker Omar Amiralay, whose Daily Life in a Syrian Village (1976) won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival, but his much-awaited follow-up, A Flood in Baath Country (2005), has been banned in Syria. Abdellatif Abdelhamid’s 2007 film Out of Coverage, which follows the life of a disappeared man (the implication is that he is a political prisoner), somehow slipped through the censors’ net. Whether this suggests a new liberalisation by the Syrian government remains to be seen, although Abdelhamid is optimistic, telling the BBC that his film represents ‘a new page in a new chapter’.
At the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Hiner Saleem marked the tentative resurgence of Iraqi cinema with the stirring Kilometre Zero.
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Yilmaz Güney: mirror to turkish history
The life of Yilmaz Güney (1937–84) provides a fascinating window onto late 20th-century Turkey. In particular, the life story and films of this Turkish-Kurdish director speak volumes for the often fraught relationship between Turkey’s governments and the country’s creative talents.
Güney began his professional life as a writer, before becoming a hugely popular young actor who appeared in dozens of films (up to 20 a year according to some reports), before again changing tack to become the country’s most successful film director. But behind that seemingly steady rise lies a life that reads like a scarcely