Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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Emirati artist Hassan Sharif, considered the founder of modern Emirati art. Alghanem has also made several short narrative films, including The Park (1997) and Salma’s Dinner (2012), and has published collections of poetry in collaboration with her husband, Khalid Albudoor.
AL-GHOUSSAINI, SAMIR (1948–2003)
Born in Baakline, a village in Mount Lebanon, filmmaker Samir Al-Ghoussaini started his career as a script boy and assistant director for filmmaker Tayssir Abboud. His first feature, The Cats of Hamra Street (1972), is an eccentric yet moralizing comedy inspired by the U.S. counterculture, with dialogue in English and the Egyptian vernacular. The film’s narrative follows the unruly adventures of two couples—Sami and Mona and Kamil and Souad—involved with a mischievous gang of bikers and drug addicts, the Hamra Cats. The tragic outcome of the film, Souad’s death, and the final confrontation between Sami and the Cats express a condemnation of the perceived deviant influence of Western counterculture on Lebanese youth. The Cats of Hamra Street’s significant box-office returns helped launch Al-Ghoussaini’s career, after which he made more than 20 commercial features between 1972 and 1994, including The Captive (1973), Women for the Winter (1974), Days in London (1977), The Adventurers (1981), The Return of the Hero (1983), Fadous and the Hitchhiker (1989), and Operation: Golden Phoenix (1994). Al-Ghoussaini’s 1979 film The Beauty and the Giants marked the beginning of the Lebanese action film genre, with its tough men, attractive women, and gangster plots set against a (Lebanese) civil war backdrop. See also CHARAFEDDINE BROTHERS, YOUSSEF (1945–) AND FOUAD (1941–).
AL-GINDI (EL-GUINDY), NADIA (1940–)
Egypt’s biggest female star throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, Al-Gindi broke into cinema after winning a prize in a beauty contest. She was married to actor Emad Hamdi for 10 years, while she played supporting roles in various generic melodramas. From the mid-1980s on, however, al-Gindi was cast increasingly in action films and, in time, especially espionage films. These were often directed by Nader Galal, examples being Mission in Tel Aviv (1992) and 48 Hours in Israel (1998). Her roles have typically been as feminine, sexualized characters who outwit their rivals. Only rarely has al-Gindi worked with less commercial or mainstream directors—although she appeared in Khairy Beshara’s Wild Desire (1991) and played a nurse in the independent film festival favorite Coming Forth by Day (Hala Lotfy, 2012).
ALI ZAOUA, PRINCE OF THE STREETS (2000)
Nabil Ayouch’s second feature revolves around four 12-year-old street children in Casablanca struggling to free themselves from an onerous gang leader and his abusive followers; in the struggle, Ali is killed. The body of the film follows his three comrades, played by actual street children, as they seek to honor Ali’s memory and dreams (of becoming a sailor) by burying him at sea. In the process, they locate Ali’s estranged mother, a prostitute, and befriend a helpful old sailor willing to believe in them and help them overcome obstacles. Ayouch interweaves animated sequences of Ali’s often drug-induced dreams with harsh depictions of the struggles street children face, thus mixing realism with experimental fantasy. In particular, the film treats the street children humanistically, relying less on stereotypes and more on sympathetic personal interrogation of their lives. By the same token, the film’s visual lushness, which lends it a romantic quality quite distinct from Third Cinema aesthetics, has incurred some scholarly criticism. The film was a smash hit in Morocco and won many national and international awards.
ALJAFARI, KAMAL (1972–)
This Palestinian filmmaker, visual artist, and educator was born in Ramleh and raised in Jaffa. He received his professional training at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, Germany, whereupon he began making experimental shorts and documentaries concerning the problematics of exile and diaspora from the transnational perspective of a return to a ruined past. His short film Visit Iraq (2003) situates this perspective metonymically in Switzerland at the onset of the Iraq War, utilizing the setting of an abandoned Iraqi Airways ticket agency to analyze visually the everyday apathy of Swiss pedestrians toward the empty property’s apparently mysterious vacancy. The essayistic documentary The Roof (2006) carries the return-to-ruins theme to Aljafari’s family home in Jaffa, which is under perpetual threat of demolition by Israeli real-estate developers. It adopts a slow-moving cinematic style that recalls, while complicating, the play between time and environment as reflected in architecture that also characterizes the films of Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai. The Roof combines expository shooting with staged fiction, a technique expanded by Port of Memory (2009), a feature-length documentary that continues Aljafari’s critical nostalgic quest, in the form of a compilation film, also set in Jaffa, comprised of scenes from Israeli bourekas genre films intercut with contemporary shots, recalling The Roof, of architectural ruins. Recollection (2015) reprises Port of Memory in order to integrate the presence of passersby—Palestinians as well as Jewish Iraqis—into Aljafari’s search for home beneath aestheticized layers of destruction.
AL-KASABA THEATRE AND CINEMATHEQUE
This Palestinian nongovernmental organization was established in Jerusalem in 1970 as Theatre Arts Group. In 1987, following the First Intifada, due to violence, general strikes, and a suffering economy, all theaters and cinemas in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) closed. Relocated to Ramallah in June 2000, as Al-Kasaba, it was the first theater and cinémathèque established after a 13-year hiatus. The current location houses seating halls and a gallery and is the only professional fully equipped venue in the OPTs for theater productions, visual exhibitions, musical performances, and films. It hosts three daily film screenings, including international blockbusters, children’s films, Palestinian and Israeli features, and documentaries, in addition to special film weeks and festivals. Al-Kasaba also assists playwrights, filmmakers, and other artists marketing to Palestinian audiences.
ALLOUACHE, MERZAK (1944–)
Born in Algiers, Allouache graduated from the Institut National du Cinéma d’Alger and, in 1967, the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in France, first working at the Office des Actualités Algériennes, then at the Centre National du Cinéma, where he directed documentaries. He is one of Algeria’s most prolific directors, with more than 20 films between Algeria and France, where he spent the most turbulent years of Algeria’s unrest. Allouache’s films always manage to involve Algeria—for example, by portraying Algerian immigrants in France.
His first feature, Omar Gatlato (1976), was hailed by French critics as the declaration of a new Algerian cinema (cinéma djidid); its success suggested that Algerians craved films that would deal complexly with Algerian social reality. Bab el-Oued City (1994), filmed in Algeria during the civil war and edited in France, captured the beginnings of the war from the same poor district of Algiers in which Omar Gatlato is set. Salut Cousin! (1996), a French coproduction, dramatizes with lighthearted humor the obstacles and challenges facing diasporic Algerians in Paris trying both to earn a living and to enjoy life under postcolonial conditions by playing on the projection by Algerians themselves of Western anti-Arab stereotypes onto the beur community. Returning to Algiers in 1999, Allouache directed The Other World (2001), about a young French woman’s search for her Algerian lover, who has been kidnapped by an armed militia. Characteristic of cinéma djidid, this film complicates the relationship between “the people,” the army, and the Islamists, refusing to characterize the national struggle and violence in Algeria in simple moral terms.
Allouache’s subsequent Bab el Web (2004) revolves around a cyber-cafe in Bab el-Oued, from which the broke but enterprising Bouzid (played by Faudel, a well-known singer) casually invites a female cyber-pal in Paris to visit him, not realizing how costly this will be for