EL-GOUNA, Egypt — Alongside celebrities gracing the
red carpet at film festivals in Egypt, the traditional powerhouse of regional
cinema, young Arab women directors are making their mark with documentaries
tackling subjects ranging from femicide to revolution.
اضافة اعلان
Taking a break from networking at the
El-Gouna Film Festival
on the Red Sea in October, Iraqi actress and director
Zahraa Ghandour, 30,
discussed her feature documentary "Women of my Life".
Iraqi actress and director Zahraa Ghandour (Photos: AFP)
"The main theme is the life and death of young women
and girls in Iraq. It explores how Iraqi society deals with femicide as if it's
normal," she told AFP.
Ghandour said that "in the last few years, a new
generation has come to the fore born in the 1990s and 2000s with a new
direction", especially after October 2019 protests calling for the
toppling of the ruling class in Iraq.
"We want to break free from the stereotypes that world
cinema boxes us into," she said.
"It's like there are trends and they (international
backers) want us to fit into these funding guidelines," said Ghandour.
"What if I want to make a horror movie? I want to make
what I want as long as it's of high quality."
"Women of My Life", in which she plays one of the
main characters, follows the gruesome death of a young woman suspected to have
been carried out by male relatives.
"As Iraqis in general, our lives are unstable but the
targeted killing of women in particular ... cannot be trivialized," she
said.
Rich tableau
For Rafia Oraidi, an independent Palestinian producer, the
fractured landscape of life under Israeli occupation provides a rich tableau
for narratives.
Working with Palestinian-American film-maker
Hind Shoufani on "They Planted Strange Trees", the international crew has been
adding final touches in post-production.
"It's a meditative journey set in Galilee that tracks
the daily life of residents of the village where the director hails from,"
said Oraidi.
Oraidi points to independent Palestinian directors such as
Hany Abu-Assad and Elia Suleiman whose films have won
Oscar nominations and
prizes at Cannes.
"Without the personal attention of film-makers,
patience, and persistence ... despite the conditions we're living under, we
wouldn't have a single film on screen," she said.
"We want to show there are lots of other stories in
Palestine besides war, destruction and the occupation," Oraidi said.
She said the biggest challenge for independent Arab
film-makers was a lack of facilities such as custom-made studios.
This "balloons the budget and we're forced to partner
up with other co-producers to get funding", she said.
Faring better than Hollywood
Tunisian screenwriter and director Fatma Riahi. (Photo: AFP)
Tunisian screenwriter and director Fatma Riahi is in the
early stages of a long feature, "My Father Killed Bourguiba", that
attempts "to tell the history of Tunisia in the last 30 years through a
biographical and personal narrative".
Focused on her father, the documentary follows his role in a
plan to overthrow Habib Bourguiba's regime in a 1987 military coup and its
current reverberations after the 2011 revolution that toppled his successor
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
"I hope the film ... gives an alternative reading ...
of Tunisian history, ... from coups to revolutions to what we're currently
experiencing under (President) Kais Saied," the director in her
mid-thirties said.
Saied himself sacked the government and seized wide-ranging
powers on July 25 citing an "imminent threat" to the country.
"For women in Arab cinema, the number of directors for
example is always less than men. It's not just a regional phenomenon but also
global," Riahi told AFP.
But Arab cinema appears to be faring better than Hollywood,
where out of the 250 biggest films released last year only 18 percent were
directed by women.
A 2019 study by
Northwestern University in Doha, for
example, found that around 50 percent of all film-makers in the Arab world were
women.
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