Netflix Launches "Celebrating Arab Cinema" Film Collection
By: Omar Mansour / Arab America Contributing Writer
Just two months after launching the “Palestinian Stories” collection on October 14th, featuring 32 award-winning films created by Palestinians or about Palestinian stories, Netflix is following it up with its “Celebrating Arab Cinema” collection, featuring 58 films from 47 different filmmakers that have been globally recognized by events such as the Academy Awards, BAFTAs, Cannes and Venice Film Festival among others. The collection will launch this week on December 9th, 2021. The collection includes a number of films screened at the Arab Film Festival over the years and will be supported with upcoming exclusives and curated content by the Arab Film and Media Institute (AFMI)
How Netflix Celebrates Arab Cinema
58 films from 47 filmmakers, including AFF audience favorites Nadine Labaki, Annemarie Jacir, Elia Suleiman, and Hany Abu-Assad (33 will be available in the US); Narrative features, shorts, and documentaries; Award-winning films, hard-to-find classics, and hidden gems; Official submissions to the Academy Awards from many different countries in the Arab world. The collection builds on both the Palestinian Stories collection released in October, but also more broadly the previously released Prestige collection 2020, celebrating outstanding talent from different parts of the Arab world and their iconic stories.
The collection features award-winning and globally recognized films such as the BAFTA-winning The Present and Lift Like a Girl which won three awards at the 2020 Cairo International Film Festival. Other features include Like Twenty Impossibles which was the first short film from the Arab world to premiere in Cannes. “The collection isn’t just fictional stories. Many of these movies were also selected to represent their country in the Academy Award submissions for Best International Feature Film, spanning different parts of the Arab world covering Egyptian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Jordanian and Iraqi stories. These are stories of love, romance, family, friendship, childhood, war, separation, big dreams, and ordinary lives. The Celebrating Arab Cinema collection does just that, bringing together the best from the Arab world” said Nuha El Tayeb, Director of Content Acquisitions, Turkey, Middle East & North Africa at Netflix.
A Glance at the Collection:
The Present
A Short story about a father and daughter navigating Israeli checkpoints in Occupied Palestine trying to buy a wedding anniversary gift. ‘The crazy thing is this film is the PG version of what actually takes place at these checkpoints’ — This Oscar-nominated short film directed by British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi shows the struggles of daily life in Palestine
Lift Like a Girl
For over 20 years, Captain Ramadan coached world-class weightlifters in Alexandria, Egypt. A larger-than-life character in his own right, Ramadan led his daughter, one of Egypt’s most famous athletes, Nahla Ramadan, to become a world champion, and trained Abeer Abdel Rahman, the first Arab woman to become a two-time Olympic medalist. Mayye Zayed’s observational documentary dives into the training of Ramadan’s new protégé: the determined Zebiba (which means “raisin”), who dreams of lifting on the level of Captain’s past stars – Toronto International Film Festival
Like Twenty Impossibles
Occupied Palestine: A serene landscape now pockmarked by military checkpoints. When a Palestinian film crew decides to avert a closed checkpoint by taking a remote side road, the political landscape unravels, and the passengers are slowly taken apart by the mundane brutality of military occupation. Both a visual poem and a narrative, like twenty impossibles, wryly questions artistic responsibility and the politics of filmmaking, while speaking to the fragmentation of a people – Mecfilm
This collection is also a great opportunity for younger generations, given the accessibility issues with some of the older films in the collection. “With the launch of this collection, I am excited to introduce these stunning films to younger generations, give our members around the world a window into new perspectives and cultures and remind Arab entertainment fans of our history. It’s a piece of their culture and heritage and now they can watch them all in one place” El Tayeb added in a statement.
Visit Arab America’s blog here!
