Film festivals are often prized in part for topicality, though sometimes you might wish they were a little less so—it often seems that nothing makes such events so pressingly relevant as very bad news in the outside world. A year ago the political climate was so grim after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks that San Francisco’s Arab Film Festival had to pull the plug on its 27th edition, scheduled for mid-November. This year it’s back, albeit against the backdrop of a global context scarcely less dire, with Israel still bombing Gaza and the Middle East closer than ever to a full-scale regional war.
Needless to say, the simplified narratives that tend to dominate US news coverage are little help in truly grasping these conflicts. So the Arab Film & Media Institute’s 28th festival program provides an invaluable opportunity to absorb different perspectives, illuminating not just current events and their historical backgrounds, but culture and experience throughout the Arab world and diaspora—via over 40 movies from 26 countries. The festival runs Thu/24-November 3 at various locations in SF plus Oakland’s New Parkway, with some streaming content starting Oct. 25.
There is of course much from and about Palestine, starting perhaps incongruously with what just might be the least depressing take on that subject imaginable at present. Opening the festival Thu/24 at the Palace of Fine Arts is Mohamed Jabaly’s Life Is Beautiful—presumably no connection to the 1997 Robert Benigni joint intended—about its maker’s unplanned exile in friendly but frigid Norway.
The antic, frizzy-haired aspiring young director got involved in a sister-city exchange between Gaza and Tromso. Invited to tour as a guest educator in that north country, he finds himself stuck there when “the only gateway between Palestinians and the rest of the world” (the Rafah border crossing to Egypt) is closed in 2014. His stateless state drags on at maddening length, subject to the whims of Norwegian bureaucracy and international politics. But throughout his ordeal, Jabaly manages (mostly) to maintain a cheerful front, treating this forced exile as a puckish adventure.
More sobering are other treatments of the subject in this year’s festival. Palestine’s Oscar-submission feature From Ground Zero provides no less than 22 Gazan filmmakers a platform, their short films adding up to a nearly two-hour whole of diverse takes on the ongoing war. A separate program of “Palestinian Voices” brings together four more shorts, some produced in conjunction with other nations such as Jordan, France, Algeria and the US.
Lebanese-Canadian documentarian Carol Mansour’s full-length Aida Returns meditates on her late mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, and nostalgia for the Palestine of her youth. Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown is an engrossing dramatic narrative about two Palestinian men stuck in Athens, just managing to stay afloat while hoping to emigrate further to Germany. They are moved to help a child refugee likewise trapped here, but that effort becomes complicated by criminal ties, a mercurial local ally, and one protagonist’s on-and-off addiction problems.
There are a couple additional areas of programming emphasis, on Lebanese and LGBTQ+ material. The first includes the world premiere of Loulwa Khoury’s We Never Left, a documentary measuring the “constant feeling of alienation” amongst a generation of exiles, long-distance activism within the filmmaker’s artistic social circle in NYC, and protests (which they join when travel is possible) against continual political and economic crisis in Beirut.
That city’s catastrophic port explosion in 2020—its precise cause still hotly debated four years later—provides impetus for another nonfiction feature, Cyril Aris’ Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano. Also set in Beirut, Mira Shabib’s Arze is a woman-driven narrative recalling neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief (and even Mildred Pierce), as its already struggling heroine finds her family’s pie-baking livelihood imperiled by the theft of the delivery scooter they depend on.
On the q-tip, “Queer Lens: The Ties That Bind” bill encompasses shorts from around the globe, including glimpses of Arab-heritage lives and communities in Libya, Canada, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and France. Amrou Al-Kadhi’s first feature Layla is an energetic fiction about the titular London native, a glam drag performer whose highly fluid gender identity both attracts and challenges a contrastingly very conventional, corporate suitor who might be “Mr. Right.”
Other highlights in the festival this year include dance-oriented Moroccan feature Backstage by Afef Ben Mahmoud & Khalil Benkirane; Tamer Ruggli’s Back to Alexandria, in which a Swiss woman journeys “home” to see the mother (French film legend Fanny Ardant) she’d fled decades earlier; Iraq’s soccer-themed Oscar submission feature Baghdad Messi, from director Sahim Omar Kalifa; Abu Bahkr Shawky’s Saudi camel-racing adventure Hajjan; Meryam Joobeur’s Tunisian magical-realist tale Who Do I Belong To; and Merzak Allouache’s Front Row, a social satire about the battle that develops between two imposing Algerian matriarchs during their families’ beach holiday.
There are more documentaries, like Rand Beiruty’s Tell Them About Us, a slice of life amongst ethnic minority teenage girls in Germany; Kamal Ourahou’s Moroccan skateboarding-scene snapshot Better; and Mohammed Latreche’s Zinet, Algiers, Happiness, which celebrates the elusive legacy of an actor, activist, and one-time director whose 1970 Viva Didou! some consider “the most unexpected, bewildering, unclassifiable” feature in all Algerian cinema. (You can find it on YouTube, albeit without subtitles.)
Closing night selection Goodbye Julia at the New Parkway on Sun/3 is a strong drama that sprawls over several years’ time, until its central characters are separated by (among other things) South Sudan’s succession in 2011. Six years earlier in northern capitol Khartoum, a tragic accident makes well-to-do housewife Mona (Eiman Yousif)—an unhappily “retired” professional singer living under the thumb of Egyptian husband Akram (Nazar Goma)—anxious to help poor southerner Julia (Siran Riak).
She hires the woman as a housekeeper, letting she and her son move into servants’ quarters. Still, as the nation’s old colonial ties wither and its separatist future looms, the secrets and solidarities binding these two very different women become imperiled. It’s an unhurried but engrossing story that effectively shrinks complex racial, class and historical divisions to the scale of a single household.
2024 ARAB FILM FESTIVAL runs Oct. 24-Nov. 3 at San Francisco locations including the Palace of the Fine Arts, AMC Kabuki 8, Roxie Theater and Artists’ Television Access, plus the New Parkway Theater in Oakland, plus limited virtual screenings available. More info here.
