The reel thing
Urgent messages charge the Arab Film Festival.

By Robert Avila

DICK CHENEY IS on Meet the Press recycling last season's bogus bogeyman stories, while recent polls show the majority of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein is culpable for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The White House will continue to serve up the fiction du jour, with a complimentary side of freedom fries, because, though bad for our health, it's good for their business. Clearly our rulers have come to depend on a nation of cultural nomads ceaselessly surfing the barren sands of television, substituting in its befogged consciousness the perfect radio wave for the prefect storm brewing just offshore. This is what we mean by the expression "getting tubed."

But look out, Dick. Nothing ruins a good war like a bunch of independent minds thinking. San Francisco's Arab Film Festival, now one of the largest of its kind in the country, started with modest aims in this direction: to offer representations of Arab people that defied the narrow range of stereotypes rife in Hollywood and mainstream media, and to enhance understanding of the Arab world. Each year since 1996 the strictly volunteer organization behind the festival has gracefully managed to do just that with a stimulating range of features, short subjects, and documentaries by and about Arabs in all their far-flung diversity.

The results are always surprising and – given the recent expansion of conflict in Iraq and Palestine and the deterioration of civil rights in the United States – have rarely seemed more urgent.

Those interested in a formal discussion of the representation of Arabs in the media can hear a noted specialist on the subject. Dr. Jack Shaheen, author of several books on cultural bias – including, most recently, Reel Bad Arabs, an exhaustive study of Hollywood stereotyping – leads off this year's opening-night program at the Castro Theatre Sept. 25. Shaheen's talk is free and open to the public.

The opening night feature, 2002's El-Kotbia (The bookstore), by Tunisian filmmaker Nawfel Saheb-Ettaba (who will attend the screening) is a pensive, extremely well-acted drama about a restless but taciturn man who returns to Tunisia after spending years in France. He joins three others, a young married couple and the groom's mother, who together work in and live above an old bookshop. Romantic and melancholy, and with a sultry beauty to it, El-Kotbia quietly broods on the tension in each character between love and the idiosyncratic demands of the self, and the social tension between compassionate cosmopolitanism and petty provincialism.

Not coincidentally, about a third of the 23 films in the seventh annual Arab Film Festival come from or concern Palestine, which, in addition to stepped-up repression, is currently experiencing the birth of a vibrant new cinema.

Among the highlights here, Palestinian director Nizar Hassan's excellent documentary Ejteyah (Invasion), made in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli army's devastating 2002 invasion of the West Bank's Jenin refugee camp, deserves attention for its intelligence and humanity. While documenting the camp residents' resistance to the invasion and their efforts to resurrect their lives and bury their dead amid the vast rubble left behind by the Israel Defense Forces where homes once stood, Hassan conducts a fascinating interview with an Israeli soldier who operated one of the massive D-9 bulldozers, habitually used by Israel for illegal house demolitions, during the attack on Jenin. The interview takes place as the soldier watches the footage Hassan has shot of the damage he helped cause and the testimony of survivors.

The interview is a highly unusual collaboration, and it becomes clear that Hassan has granted the understandably nervous but admirably forthcoming soldier the right to approve the final cut of the film. Through Hassan's film, both sides face each other with their own account of the event and the rationale behind it. One can't help thinking of all the others who might legitimately be asked to answer the questions put to the Israeli driver of a machine like the one that killed American activist Rachel Corrie: why not too the CEO of Caterpillar, the U.S. company that makes them, or any of the members of the U.S. Congress, Democrat or Republican, who allow American taxes to buy such terrorist toys while knowing what they will be used for? The stark reality depicted in Ejteyah suggests that, in the words of Israel's Avraham Burg, such a situation "is not a matter of Labour versus Likud or right versus left, but of right versus wrong, acceptable versus unacceptable."

"Like Twenty Impossibles," a short film by Palestinian American director Annemarie Jacir (who appears in person at the screening), follows in faux-documentary style a Palestinian American director and her film crew as they attempt to circumvent an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank only to be stopped along a deserted side road. "Like Twenty Impossibles" blurs the line between truth and fiction to tell a story of art bowed but not defeated by the routine violence of the Israeli occupation.

Contemporary significance and aesthetic merit also powerfully combine in Under the Sky of Baghdad, an Italian-made documentary shot last year during the buildup to the U.S-U.K. invasion of Iraq. Twenty Italian musicians mingle in the vibrant, teeming streets of the cosmopolitan Iraqi capital, while ordinary Iraqis eloquently speak of their history and values, the consequences of the last Gulf War, and their hopes for peace. Amid the exhilarating soundtrack and lush cinematography, a complex landscape emerges mixing such disparate elements as the indoctrination in leader-worship of a group of schoolchildren, the savvy insights of street vendors and taxicab drivers, faith of art students in the endurance of the value of beauty, and the hospitality of an Iraqi family – all beneath a wild blue sky that repeatedly finds its way into the words and prayers of Iraqis, like a sacred talisman, a proof of eternity.

Now knowing the fate that would befall the city and its already scarred inhabitants makes Under the Sky of Baghdad emotionally trying at times, but this is a wonderfully human portrait of a deeply poetic culture. And there is undeniable justice in heeding the voices of a people otherwise obscured from view by the machinations of the U.S. government's war machine.

Arab Film Festival opens Thurs/25, Castro Theatre, S.F. Runs through Oct. 5, Roxie Cinema, S.F.; UC Berkeley, Wheeler Auditorium, Berk.; Towne Theatre, San Jose. See First Runs, in Film listings, for weekly shows and times. For a complete schedule go to www.aff.org. For more information call (415) 564-2203.