From April 2nd to 7th Florence is hosting the 10th Middle East Now festival. Dedicated to films and contemporary culture in the Middle East and North Africa, this Italian festival also offers photographic exhibitions, concerts and installations.
Love and Revenge, a live performance by the Lebanese duo Rayess Bek and Randa Mirza, opens the festival on Tuesday April 2nd at the La Compagnia cinema. This VJing show, featuring excerpts from cult Arab films and popular songs, will be followed by the screening of Aboozar Amini’s first documentary film Kabul, City in the Wind. The screening, a first in Italy, continues with the director talking with the audience.
The Middle East Now programme is based on various categories — in the feature film section, which includes drama and documentary, 18 films have been selected. Among them many films being seen for the first time in Italy, such as the Lebanese film Heaven Without People by Lucien Boujeily, and the Iranian documentary Finding Farideh by Azadeh Mousavi and Kourosh Ataee. The Focus Emerging Film-makers section showcases promising young talents by presenting four documentary films from Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey.
Middle East Now also promotes more confirmed directors. For this 10th edition, the Iranian filmmaker Ashgar Farhadi is guest of honour, with a retrospective of his work — a chance for audiences to discover or rediscover on the big screen five of his feature films: Fireworks Wednesday (2006), A Separation (2011), About Elly (2009), The Past (2013) and The Salesman (2016) ). In addition to these screenings, the director of Everybody Knows will host a master class on April 6th.
As well as films, the festival is also offering an exhibition of photographs by Dalia Khamassy Until We Return at the Studio Marangoni Foundation. The Lebanese photographer tells the stories of Syrian refugees in Lebanon and their desire to return home. Another exhibition, this one at the Compagnia cinema is a multimedia installation, Flavours of Iraq, made up of 20 animated shorts directed by Leonard Cohen, based on the personal story of a French-Iraqi reporter, Feurat Alani.
Sources: https://www.nove.firenze.it/ , https://middleastnow.it/
