Experiments in Arab Cinema curated by Laura U. Marks November 15-­‐16, 2013 SFU Woodward's Goldcorp Center for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver $15 for series pass; for SFU students, $5 per screening Across the Arab world, independent artistic creation has bloomed in recent years, revealing a brilliant and subversive underside to stereotypes about the region. These works experiment with storytelling, manual and digital animation, mining archives of cinematic and television, and expanding the expressive capacities of film and video. They refuse demands to explain and "represent," instead supplying vivid images, strong sensations, and pungent narrative twists. Celebrated internationally but still difficult to access, these works come to Vancouver through SFU prof Laura Marks' extensive research in the region. A reception with cash bar and catering by Nuba follows the November 15 program. Event page Facebook page November 15 8 p.m. The Glitch Program Digital glitch shows the physical nature of digital media, which, in many Arab countries, refers to problems with bandwidth, power cuts, and pirated media. Glitch shows you can't count on the image, in Gheith Al-­‐Amine's powerful meditation on images of women and women's self-­‐image, Once Upon a Sidewalk. Glitch protests corporate ownership of code, in works like Ahmed Elshaer's Recycle the Code. Other works dig down to the algorithms underlying the image: in Al-­‐
Amine's hilarious text animation, Elshaer's machinima Home, Mohssin Harraki's virtuosic mathematical rendering, and Mounir Fatmi's tongue-­‐in-­‐cheek Islamic DJ booth. Finally, Ahmed Nagy's dizzying double-­‐screen video, The Holy Zero, explains the numerical forces underlying the visible world. Gheith al-­‐Amine, King Lost His Tooth (2012, 5:00) Mohssin Harraki, Problème 5 (arabes généalogiques) (Morocco/France, 2010-­‐2011, 2:14) Mounir Fatmi, Mixology (Morocco/France, 2010, 11:40) Ahmed El Shaer, Recycle the Code (Egypt, 2010, 2:47) Ahmed El Shaer, Home (Egypt, 2006, 6:00) Gheith al-­‐Amine, Once Upon a Sidewalk (Lebanon, 2009, 20:00) Ahmed Nagy, The Holy Zero (Egypt, 2010, 30:00) November 16, 3 p.m. Unbearable Beauty The glitch theme also animates Rania Stefan's gorgeous and achingly sad The Three Disappearances of Souad Hosni, made entirely of VHS video clips from the great Egyptian actress's career. Three Disappearances shows how loss, forgetting, and violence attach to popular narratives of women like those Hosni portrayed throughout her career, and become encoded in the medium itself. Preceded by Dima El-­‐Horr's sensuous and erotic meditation on men and seawater, filmed along Beirut's Corniche. Dima el-­‐Horr, The Blue Sea in Your Eyes (Lebanon, 2006, 10:00) Rania Stephan, The Three Disappearances of Souad Hosni (Lebanon, 2011, 70:00) November 16, 8 p.m. The Body in the Archive Like The Three Disappearances of Souad Hosni, some of these works search for latent histories in archives of cinema and late-­‐night TV. Maha Maamoun's 2026 is a dark science-­‐fiction fantasy inspired by Chris Marker's low-­‐budget classic La Jetée. Raed Yassin's The New Film of 2009, composed of hundreds of Egyptian popular films, proves scarily prescient of the longevity of Egypt's military regime. Sherif El Azma's dive into the archive of 1930s Egyptian and colonial cinema results in a seductive and uncanny neo-­‐noir drama. Others search for bodies hiding behind the screen of low-­‐res video or text, often animated by homoerotic desire, as in Akram Zaatari's Tomorrow Everything Will Be All Right and Mahmoud Khaled's Camaraderie, while in Khaled's This Show Is My Business a male belly dancer describes his struggle to bend the gender of his chosen profession. And in the exquisitely filmed narrative Ashes, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joriege treat a funeral wake as an occasion for myriad tender caresses. But the body is missing! Maha Maamoun, 2026 (Egypt, 2010, 9:00) Raed Yassin, The New Film (Lebanon/Egypt, 2009, 9:00) Sherif el-­‐Azma, Rice City (2010, 19:00) Mahmoud Khaled, Camaraderie (Egypt, 2009, 10:30) Mahmoud Khaled, This Show Is My Business (Egypt, 2008, 15:50) Akram Zaatari, Tomorrow Everything Will Be All Right (Lebanon, 2010, 12:00) Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joriege, Ashes (Lebanon, 2003, 26:00) The Blue Sea in Your Eyes King Lost His Tooth Ashes