Meet the New Guard of Arab Film
As the Arab world reimagines its boundaries, it seems a good moment to reflect on how the medium of cinema has been reshaped by a new generation of film-makers. The last few years have seen a new guard carve out a niche for themselves, breaking on to the international film festival circuit with their divergent portraits of Arabic daily life.
Ahmad Abdalla
Thirty-two-year-old Abdalla makes vital films that capture the youthful spirit of Egypt’s major cities. Reawakening a realism that has been missing in Egyptian cinema since the late 1960s, Abdalla merges a verite camera style with astutely edited montages of activism on the streets. His acclaimed second feature, Microphone (2010), portrays the dissident underground arts movement in Alexandria, capturing a world in which Arabic hip-hop meets conceptual Egyptian video art.
Zeina Durra
London-based Durra made a splash with her debut feature, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! In the opening scene her protagonist, a wealthy bohemian émigré called Asya, poses in the nude while wearing an Arab headdress and gazing directly into the camera. Set in New York, Imperialists contrasts representations of impoverished immigrant culture with a group of affluent wanderers experiencing urban life.
Imad and Swel Noury
Morocco’s burgeoning cinema scene is now ranked third in Africa in terms of feature-length production. Imad and Swel Noury, or “the Brothers” as they sometimes refer to themselves, make enthralling motion pictures. Their latest, The Man Who Sold the World (2009), is an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story A Faint Heart, which unravels a complex love triangle between two close friends. Thirty-two-year-old Swel and 28-year-old Imad often work with their Spanish mother, Pilar Cazorla, who serves as producer, allowing the duo to indulge in their cinematic fantasies.
Ahmad and Mohammad Abu Nasser
The artists/film-makers more commonly known as Tarzan and Arab recently won the Palestinian Young Artist award for their imaginative pastiche of Hollywood cinema, Gazawood (2010). The twin brothers’ unwavering passion for genre cinema is evidenced by their noirish take on American film, appropriated here in a Gaza-based context.
Rania Attieh
Attieh’s debut, Okay, Enough Goodbye (2011) – co-directed with American-born Daniel Garcia – evokes the inertia of the northern Lebanese city Tripoli. The film revolves around a middle-aged man dependent on his mother, who finds that he must construct life anew when she abandons him to live in Beirut. As he stumbles through the day, his comic attempts to forge relationships with a young boy, a willing prostitute and an Ethiopian maid, all result in failure.
Mai Iskander
With Garbage Dreams (2009), Iskander exposed the underbelly of the trash trade that existed on the outskirts of Cairo. Here, over 60,000 zaballeen (Arabic for “garbage people”) survive by recycling 80% of the waste they find. The film follows three teenage boys as their livelihood is threatened by the arrival of multinationals and they are forced to reconsider how to lead their lives. The Sundance Institute is supporting Iskander’s next documentary, which will examine the recent events in Egypt through the eyes of a 22-year-old reporter.
Omar Kholeif
Guardian.co.uk