In the early 1990s, five leading Arab film directors were asked to create a short work that expressed their thoughts and feelings about the first Gulf War and its impact on Arab people, culture and intellectual thought. The Gulf War, What Next? is the revealing and rewarding feature-length collection of these five impressive short works.
Tag: FRANCE
A man recollects the conflict in the middle east through his personal memory. In this short documentary, Omar Amiralay reflects on the first time he heard of Israel. Through recorded conversations with filmmaker Mohamed Malas, both Amiralay and Malas share their own unique stories and experiences about Israel and Israeli occupation. In the company of fellow Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas, the ground-breaking director Omar Amiralay revisits the ruins of the destroyed Golan village of Quneytra, occupied by Israel and then abandoned following the 1973 war.
A family of aristocrats have fallen on hard times. To pay for repairs to their crumbling country chateau they are forced to use their home as a hotel. The local garage mechanic, Charlie, provides a constant stream of guests for them by sabotaging any car that arrives in his garage. The latest arrival is an important-looking man, Cesar Maricorne, accompanied by his two aides. When she learns that he is a gangster who has just robbed a bank, the aging Marquise realises that her family’s financial worries may be at an end.
In the light of the moon, a young torero leaves his village to go and fight the “Toro”. An accomplice, dreamlike confrontation, where the interplay of shadows and silhouettes brings back the splendor of bullfighting mythology.
This hilarious film alternates three kinds of material: footage of barking dogs, shots of streets and other locations, and a ludicrously overdetermined melodramatic story, illustrated chiefly by a series of stills (and occasionally by shots in motion) and narrated off-screen. The net result of its combined strategies is to reveal melodrama itself as a pure formal mechanism, with characters and plot reduced to the status of necessary props.
The fantasies and dreams of two over-the-hill actresses are intertwined with their realities, as the two roommates struggle to survive their day-to-day lives in the expensive and difficult world of Paris.
François Truffaut said of Paul Vecchiali in his early days that he was “the only true heir of Jean Renoir.” The first short film of this director, who was to become a singular figure of independent French cinema, follows the path of an elderly woman towards her memories and beyond. Attentive, affectionate and sometimes cruel, Vecchiali’s camera invents its own expressive language.
A rundown suburban villa is home to three individuals who live happily together. Fernand and Alexa are fugitives from ill-fated marriages; Louis is a young bisexual musician who couldn’t get on with his parents. The strange ménage attracts the attentions of a police inspector, but he is also drawn into this world of mutual tolerance and free love, becoming their friend when his own wife leaves him. The happy community looks as if it might be falling apart when Fernand falls in love with a young middleclass woman…