Film
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My Very Short Middle East Movie List
Recently a professor in the US asked me if I could put together a list of Arabic language films she might be able to use in her women’s studies and global studies classes. This is only a short excursion around 20 plus countries sharing a common language and multiple problems and plenty of quirkiness. Continue reading
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Poetic Pomegranates
Nothing like a Rumi poem about pomegranates to sum up what is hip in literature and food circles today. Both these Middle Eastern imports—Rumi and pomegranates– have gone from near obscurity to near cliché levels in Western cultural hotspots over the past few years. Yet another reason for the pomegranate to laugh in Rumi’s poem. Continue reading
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Where are the Actors?
Every year I ask this, and here I go again for the third time, “Know any enthusiastic student filmmakers living in the Middle East?” If so, please let them know about the Zayed University Middle East Film Festival, which brings together student films from across the Middle East to reveal an industry in rebirth, as Continue reading
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A Good Library is Hard To Find
What is more important in a library than anything else – than everything else – is the fact that it exists. ~Archibald MacLeish, “The Premise of Meaning,” American Scholar, 5 June 1972 The other day in Jordan, my mother made the day of a young Spanish woman with whom we were chatting by telling her Continue reading
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Zayed University Film Festival In San Francisco
There has been more than one time me in my life when the call to prayer has been a comfort to me, and that includes at 4:30 a.m. yesterday when I had to walk to my car in the dark to go get to school in time for “The Best the Zayed University Film Festival” Continue reading
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Horse Power and the Abu Dhabi Film Festival
Everyone says the UAE has only two seasons, hot and hotter. But there is a far better season, the film festival season. The Abu Dhabi Film Festival kicked off last week and is now going strong with 170 films from around the world. Tops on my list to see are Miral, Carlos, Kingdom of Women, Continue reading
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The Abu Dhabi Zoo Effect VS. Sex and the City
They missed the real Abu Dhabi in Sex and the City II, and in the real Abu Dhabi, tourists and Arabs wouldn’t notice Carrie and her gang–there are plenty of scantily designer-dressed Western women seeking really rich men walking around here. The women that get the head turns are the women you can’t really see. Continue reading
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A Palestinian Filmmaker in Israel
For years, my friend Hala Gabriel has been working on documentary about the destruction in 1948 of Tantura, her family’s picturesque village in what was then Palestine. For a Palestinian to even attempt such a project as hers is to face unfathomable odds, which she has. Finally, she was able to get to Tantura in Continue reading
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THE OTHER WINNERS OF THE ZAYED UNIVERSITY FILM FESTIVAL
With several local celebrities on hand as well as, due to remarkably good timing, the brilliant American writer and actor Anna Deveare Smith, trophies were handed out yesterday to student filmmakers from Lebanon, Jordan, and Qatar, in the closing ceremony marking the end of the first annual Zayed University Film Festival. Twelve films from the Continue reading
Alia Yunis 