The 12th Catalonia Festival of Arab and Mediterranean Film opened on November 8th in Barcelona with the screening of Daily life in a Syrian village, a film by the great director and writer Omar Amiralay. This documentary made in 1974 with the playwright Saadallah Wannous had been banned in Syria. By showing the daily life of a village it reveals the violence and the failure of the agrarian reform.
Syria was again in the spot-light with two other documentaries, Yasmine Fedda’s Queens of Syria (2014) and Ziad Kalthoum’s Taste of Cement (2017).
There was a retrospective of Egyptian director Youssef Chahine – a chance to see some of his most famous films on the big screen: La Terre (1969), Alexandrie, pourquoi? (1978) and Alexandrie, encore et toujours (1989). Chahine, born in 1926 in Alexandria, has marked the history of cinema with more than thirty feature films.
Another classic was also projected, this time in a restored version: Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. Censored in France when it was originally released in 1966, the Italian director’s film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival the same year.
The screening in Barcelona was followed by La bataille d’Alger, un film dans l’Histoire, a documentary by Algerian Malek Bensmail which looks at the role of Pontecorvo’s film.
The Festival of Arab and Mediterranean Cinema is organized by the NGO Sodepau and a group of Lebanese film-makers who hope, through this event, to “break with the stereotypes about the Arab world” and to bring out the “aspirations, concerns, contradictions and conflicts which preoccupy the Mediterranean peoples.”
14 feature-length drama and documentary films from Syria, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt made up this 12th edition, which closed on November 18th.
Sources: https://www.lavanguardia.com, http://www.ccma.cat
