Paradise Now Current Analysis Paradise Now's Understated Power Joining Ang Lee, director of the gay cowboy epic Brokeback Mountain, among the winners at the January 16 Golden Globes award ceremony was the director Hany Abu-Assad, a Palestinian born in Israel whose Paradise Now took home the prize for best foreign language film. While critics of all persuasions Lori Allen • 10 min read
MER Article Persons of Interest Persons of Interest (Allison Maclean and Tobias Perse). New York: First Run/ Icarus Films, 2004. Louise Cainkar • 3 min read
Current Analysis Fahrenheit 9/11 Plays Cairo The cinema was crowded but not full when, at the end of August, Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 opened in a theater in Cairo's leafy southern suburb of Maadi. An audience made up of expatriate employees of UN agencies and well-heeled Egyptians snickered at each of Garay Menicucci • 6 min read
MER Article Football and Film in the Islamic Republic of Iran Maziar Bahari opens his documentary, Football Iranian Style (2001), at Tehran’s Azadi Stadium, where a large mural of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic until his death in 1989, peers down on the 110,000 soccer fans filling the bleachers. Like 75 percent of Iran’ Shiva Balaghi • 9 min read
MER Article Iranian Documentary Cinemas between Reality and Fiction Iranian cinema has made its name in the world with the poetic simplicity that marks the work of filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami. Shot entirely on location, his films have used non-actors to tell stories drawn from real events. Kiarostami’s great work Close Up (1990) follows the true story of Persheng Vaziri • 5 min read
MER Article Iranian Cinema Following the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the inauguration of the Islamic Republic, many predicted that new restrictions would kill off Iran's cinema. But Iranian film has survived, undergoing remarkable transformations in parallel with the wider changes in Iranian culture and society. Today, Ira Ziba Mir-Hosseini • 9 min read
MER Article Spatial Fantasies Rivka, the tragic protagonist of Amos Gitai's new film Kadosh, is unable to conceive a child. Her anxiety is acute. The ultra-Orthodox community of Me'ah She'arim in West Jerusalem, in which Rivka lives with her husband Meir, is known to ostracize its barren women. Seeking spiritual guidance, she le Rebecca L. Stein • 10 min read
MER Article Women's Space/Cinema Space Post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema has attracted critical attention abroad while constituting a vibrant focus of cultural, narrative and technical experimentation at home. In the politically restrictive context of the Islamic Republic, film has become one of the key ways that sensitive topics are bro Norma Claire Moruzzi • 13 min read
MER Article Boys in the Mud For migrants of Maghrebi (North African) origin, the internal barriers of popular prejudices among the “host” population are often as difficult to surmount as the external frontiers of fortress Europe. Dominated by majority ethnic groups, the media have played a powerful role in disseminating largely negative images of immigrant minorities. Alec C. Hargreaves • 4 min read
MER Article History as Social Critique in Syrian Film Muhammad Malas’ al-Layl and Ryad Chaia’s al-Lajat History is back in fashion in Syria. The last few years have seen a flurry of Syrian films and TV series treating historical epochs from Zenobia’s Palmyra to the French occupation (1920-1946). The latter has been especially well represented in this Robert Blecher • 6 min read
MER Article Youssef Chahine's "Cairo" An unemployed young man wanders into a mosque where an Islamist is calling for jihad against those who falsely claim to be Muslim. The “fundamentalist” quotes the Qur’an: “For he who lives not by my law is but an infidel.” Prayer. Voiceover: “Cut.” The fundamentalist and the unemployed man jump up a Nur Elmessiri • 6 min read
MER Article On the Right to Dream, Love and Be Free Michel Khleifi, born in Nazareth in 1950, studied theater and cinema at INSAS in Belgium, where he currently resides. In 1980, Khleifi directed his first film, Fertile Memory (al-Dhakira al-Khasiba). Khleifi received international acclaim following Wedding in Galilee (‘Urs fi al-Jalil, 1987), which Livia Alexander • 8 min read
