For its 10th edition, Ayyam Beirut al-Cinema’iya is all about diversity. Beirut DC, organizers of Lebanon’s resilient festival of Arab indie cinema, have programmed “a tour of the most important current issues in the Arab world.”
Running through April 6, Ayyam Beirut will project fiction and nonfiction films, features and shorts, variously addressing the Palestinian condition, revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, political extremism, and various humanitarian and social issues plaguing Arab society including corruption, poverty and the refugee crisis.
The festival opens March 29 with a projection of Talal Derki’s award-winning 2017 doc “Of Fathers and Sons.”
This contentious film takes audiences to Syria’s Idlib province and the home of Abu Osama, a fighter in the erstwhile Nusra Front.
For some two years the filmmaker and a colleague posed as sympathetic journalists, capturing unique vignettes from the private lives of a group generally dehumanized by the news media.
Ayyam Beirut’s program has several highlights - notable Lebanese titles and award-winning regional films, all selected for premiere at various blue chip international festivals in the past couple of years.
Among these is Hajooj Kuka’s offbeat romantic comedy “aKasha,” 2018. Set in Sudan during the height of the country’s civil war it follows the adventures of Adnan - a revolutionary hero whose affection for his AK47 is rivaled only by that for his gal Lina - after his commander imagines he’s gone AWOL.
Another African crowd-pleaser is “Yomeddine,” Abu Bakr Shawky’s 2018 feature film debut centering on Egypt’s social outcasts.
A road movie, it tells the story of a Nubian orphan named Obama who sees his friend Beshay leaving Cairo’s trash mountain and decides to stow away. “Yomeddine” was praised for casting a badly scarred former leper to play its principal character, Beshay, and Shawky’s film is unique for the utter lack of condescension with which it treats its many marginal characters.
Fans of Egyptian indies may be curious to see “EXT. NIGHT.”
Ahmad Abdalla’s most recent feature is also a road movie, albeit one confined to Cairo. It follows a filmmaker, his cabbie and a party girl they pick up as they navigate one peculiar night, breaking social norms and flirting with its boundaries as they go.
Among the local heroes returning for their Beirut premiere are Cyril Aris, Cynthia Choucair, Ghassan Salhab, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rami Sabbagh and Ghassan Halwani. Few will be surprised that a strong nonfiction sensibility runs through their works.
Aris’ “The Swing” is an oddly affecting feature-length documentary that follows the final months in the life of the filmmaker’s grandfather, Antoine.
The old man is so frail that it’s decided to keep a terrible secret from him, a decision that increasingly troubles the rest of the family.
“Counting Tiles” recounts Choucair’s experience accompanying her sister Sabine and a clown troupe to Lesbos, where they’re determined to entertain refugees detained on the island. In the process the filmmaker and her subjects collide with the policies of “Fortress Europe.”
A prize winner at the Carthage and Cairo film festivals, Halwani’s debut feature “Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible” offers an imaginative treatment of Lebanon’s unfortunate policies vis-a-vis those who went missing during the country’s long Civil War.
The final artwork to emerge from Dubai’s now-bankrupted Abraaj Art Prize, “Walled/Unwalled,” 2018, is the fruit of Abu Hamdan’s research into the intersection of sound, individual liberty and state security technologies. The short work frames the tales of Kyllo, a U.S. pot farmer and merchant, South African athlete and convicted murderer Oscar Pistorius, and former prisoners of the Syrian regime’s Sednaya execution center.
Ayyam Beirut’s venues are as diverse as its movies. While Metropolis Cinema-Sofil hosts most programming, Dar El-Nimer will project films on Palestine, while other screenings will be held at Lebanese American University, Beirut, Sidon’s Ishbilia Theater and Hammana Artist House. An evening of music videos will be held at KED in Karatina.
Ayyam Beirut is the exhibition component of Beirut Cinema Week, a suite of cinema events that includes mentoring and industry platforms for cinema professionals. These professional platforms are appropriately diverse in their concerns.
BCW actually commenced earlier this week with the Impact Lab (March 26-29). This four-day workshop assembled 31 professionals from the Arab world, including the directors of nine feature-length documentaries from seven Arab countries, with the aim of developing “impactful documentary films.”
The docs served as case studies for exploring how nonfiction film can be useful in encouraging social change and the developing relationship between cinema and civil society.
Ayyam Beirut’s principal industry partner is the Beirut Cinema Platform (March 29-31), a co-production platform that assembles independent Arab producers and filmmakers, feature-length fiction and nonfiction film projects and regional and international industry professionals with the aim of encouraging co-productions and collaborations.
This year, 21 in-competition projects and eight out-of-competition projects from 10 Arab countries will meet with some 40 Lebanese, regional and international producers and other professionals.
Metropolis Cinema Association’s Beirut Locarno Industry Academy International (March 29 to April 1) is a workshop whose mission is to familiarize young industry professionals - working in sales, marketing, online and traditional distribution, exhibition and programming - with the challenges of the regional and international indie film industry.
A group of 12 participants from Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Algeria and Sudan have been invited to mingle with 11 experts from different European distribution companies, sales agencies, festivals, markets and VOD platforms.
All are expected to participate in cases studies, tutorials, master classes, roundtables and swap stories.
The full program of Ayyam Beirut al-Cinema’iya is available for download at metropoliscinema.net.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
