FEBRUARY 6

War and Love in Kabul

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From the The New York Times review:

Hossein and Shaima have loved each other since childhood. As teenagers, they were separated by war. Now, they meet again in Kabul in the 1990s. Poverty forced Hossein to fight in the war. A shell splinter leaves him a paraplegic. Shortly afterwards, Shaima is sold in marriage to a man 40 years her senior. Despite the fact that Shaima is with child, her father brings her back into the constraining patriarchal fold as her husband never paid her dowry in full. These complex circumstances do not prevent these two lovers from seeing each other, even though this means going against their families' rules and living in fear of revenge.

Location: Marshall 490

Director
Helga Reidemeister

Country of Origin
Germany

Language
Dari

Year/Time
2009/87 min

Presenter
Samy Ayoub

MARCH 6

Private

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From The New York Times review:

Saverio Costanzo's film "Private" distills the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a nightmarish microcosm when a midnight raid by Israeli soldiers on the house of a peaceful, well-educated Palestinian family turns the home into an occupied territory.

Imprisoning the family on the ground floor and commandeering the upstairs as a lookout, the soldiers tell the confined that under no circumstances are they to go upstairs.

The home is that of Mohammad (Mohammad Bakri), a Palestinian school principal who believes in nonviolence; his wife, Samiah (Areen Omari); and their five children: a large, isolated two-story stone house in a crossfire zone between a Palestinian village and an Israeli settlement on the West Bank. While their house is occupied, the family members are allowed to go about their business during the day; at night they are confined to the living room.

Their predicament, their internal conflicts and their edgy relationship with their captors, who become a bit more humanized as the story goes along, make "Private" an emotionally and politically loaded allegory…. The first feature film by Mr. Costanzo, an Italian documentarian, "Private" is based on a true story. It was filmed documentary-style on digital video with hand-held cameras, in southern Italy, where the rocky terrain resembles that of the West Bank.

Location: Marshall 490

Director
Saverio Costanzo

Country of Origin
Italy

Language
Arabic/Hebrew/English

Year/Time
2004/90 min

Presenter
Lucia Carminati

APRIL 3

Marooned in Iraq

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From The New York Times review:

Mr. Ghobadi, a Kurdish resident of Iran and the director of the impressive ''Time for Drunken Horses'' (2000), has set ''Marooned in Iraq'' in the period immediately after the Persian Gulf war, when Saddam Hussein was trying to soothe the sting of defeat by bombing and gassing his country's Kurdish population.

The stark horror of these attacks is portrayed with devastating force in Mr. Ghobadi's film, not by dramatizing the attacks themselves but by filming their aftermath: entire villages abandoned, thousands of refugees crowded into camps, snow-covered fields that contain mass graves. Though these images date from a time 10 years in the past (and were filmed two years ago, well before the current conflict), their relevance could not be greater. Here, in the mourning crowds and lonely survivors, are the human faces that trump any statistic about the human cost of war.

Yet for all of the film's anguish, Mr. Ghobadi provides an affirmative counterpoint. The film is structured as a journey, from Iranian Kurdistan to Iraqi Kurdistan, undertaken by a locally famous singer, Mirza (Shahab Ebrahimi), and his two adult sons, Barat (Faegh Mohammadi) and Audeh (Allah-Morad Rashtian), in search of Mirza's ex-wife, Hanareh (Iran Ghobadi), a singer who left for Iraq after the Iranian revolution prohibited her from performing in public.

Like most road movies, ''Marooned in Iraq'' consists of vignettes of varying tone as the three men make their way across the mountainous landscape that spans the Iraq-Iran border. Some of the episodes are tragic and some quite funny, even as we hear the sounds of Hussein's jets flying overhead and bombs impacting in the distance.

If Mr. Ghobadi's dominant theme is the devastation of the Kurds, his subdominant tone is one of strength, resistance and fertility. Communities are destroyed, but families are created as all three men forge new emotional alliances, either by falling in love or adopting children. The Kurdish nation, Mr. Ghobadi suggests, is really the Kurdish family, extending in all directions through a region in which everyone seems to know, or at least to have heard of, everyone else.

 
Location: Marshall 490

Director
Bahman Ghobadi

Country of Origin
Iran

Language
Kurdish/Persian

Year/Time
2002/108 min

Presenter
Isra Yaghoubi

MAY 1

The Bubble

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From The New York Times review:

Vacillating provocatively between romantic comedy and political tragedy, “The Bubble” is photographed with a sunny brightness that belies the gravity of its intentions.

Set primarily in the fashionable Sheinkin Street district of Tel Aviv, the story follows three left-leaning 20-somethings (two men and a woman) whose notion of political action is to hold a “rave against the occupation.” But when Noam (Ohad Knoller), a sweet-natured music-store clerk and reserve soldier, meets a handsome Palestinian named Ashraf (Yousef Sweid), their escalating affair forces everyone to face reality in the cruelest possible way.

Squeezing a lot of conflict — sexual, ethnic and intellectual — into its 117 minutes, “The Bubble” is about the appeal of self-delusion and the warmth of comfort zones. Noam’s best friend, Yali (Alon Friedmann), a cafe manager, reproaches Noam for habitually choosing unavailable men yet denies his own attraction to casually aggressive partners.

Meanwhile, Ashraf’s fond sister (Roba Blal) and her future husband, a Hamas leader aptly named Jihad (Shredy Jabarin), negate Ashraf’s homosexuality by coercing him into a straight relationship.

Eytan Fox directs with compassion but also with impatience for his characters’ self-centered naïveté, veering somewhat uneasily between these tones and relying on the competence of his actors to smooth the transitions. And though his ending is more poetic than just, it effectively diverts partisan sympathies toward a more general condemnation of violence. Mr. Fox may be a romantic, but he understands that love is rarely all you need.

Location: Marshall 490

Director
Eytan Fox

Country of Origin
Israel

Language
Hebrew/Arabic/English

Year/Time
2006/117 min

Presenter
Sam McNeil