Festivals & Frites
Making a hard-hitting film in the Arab world is part miracle, part courage, while screening it internationally is an often-bumpy ride. Emirates Man hops aboard a European film festival circuit tour, with a side portion of Belgian fries
Amer Shomali pauses to take a sip of his drink. I’ve watched the lm too many times,” he says. “In editing and animation and post-production, so at this stage I can lip-sync the lm by heart. I can’t watch it anymore. And if I do, I keep saying maybe I should have done this differently’.”
Shomali is sitting in the top bar of The oyal Flemish Theatre ( S), one of the nest buildings in Brussels and the central venue for the Eye on Palestine festival. It is here, in the new Italianate auditorium below, that his lm, The anted 18, has just nished screening.
Grand and imposing, with fa ades, balconies and a grand staircase that have undergone meticulous restoration, the S is the kind of venue that lm directors dream of. It is also a high water mark of modern architectural design.
Brussels can often feel underrated as a city. Filled with Eurocrats and blighted by nondescript corporate buildings, much of Belgium’s allure lies in gloriously picturesque cities such as Bruges and Ghent, their 15th century lm-set appeal relegating Brussels to second-rate status and the fallacy of mediocrity. Yet such perceptions do Brussels a disservice. ively and walkable, its old centre – particularly the cobbled market square of a GrandPlace – is an architectural jewel, stretching from the Brabantine Gothic masterpiece that is the H tel de ille, to the abundance of art nouveau structures scattered liberally across the city. a Grand-Place
Lively and walkable, Brussels’ old centre – particularly the cobbled market square of La Grand-Place – is an architectural jewel
alone – an eclectic blend of architectural and artistic styles – is a triumph of Western European culture, although it is the nation’s predominantly edible icons – chocolate, waffles and frites – that appeal the most and render Brussels a dietary disaster.
Screening a long, dense, emotional and unforgiving Palestinian documentary such as Hind Shoufani’s Trip Along
Exodus in such a city is no easy task. Made for an Arab audience and not pandering to any perceived necessity to abridge, condense or explain, the risk is as much with the festival as it is with the director. How do you take an experimental art house documentary that explores the past 70 years of Palestinian politics through the prism of the life of Shoufani’s father to the world? How do you reconcile experimentation with critical success? How do you draw audiences to a documentary steeped in the failure of its protagonist?
The auditorium of the S Bol is only partially lled for the European premiere of Shoufani’s lm a few days later, and as she takes to the stage there is an unuttered sense of disappointment. The several hundred people who attended the world premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival last December fade into memory, and although there are congratulations from the occasional cinemagoer, this is not how it was supposed to be.
As the Brussels night closes around us, Shoufani dips into silence. The sound of police sirens echoes in the distance and we walk up Boulevard Baudouin towards Hotel Bloom, past the dome of the Botanical Garden of Brussels, and on to Rue Royale. Within the minimalist design and contemporary aesthetics of the hotel lobby, we continue to talk. “I always knew it was going to be hard,” she admits. “I always knew it would be a long journey. You can spend thousands and employ dozens and in the end your lm could never see the light of day unless you ght hard and persevere.”
We travel by train to London and a few days of tranquillity, before heading back across the English Channel with ease to Paris and the European Independent Film Festival in Montparnasse. We walk endlessly. Along Boulevard du Montparnasse, up Boulevard Saint-Michel, through the gravelled paths and green lawns of the Jardin du Luxembourg, up into Saint-Germain-desPrés and on to the Latin Quarter and the Left Bank of the Seine. At Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain, four of us drink coffee and eat apple and cinnamon tart with the Moroccan-born French singer Sapho, whom Shoufani had met at the Déclamons poetry festival in Rennes a few weeks earlier. Elegant and endlessly chatty, she is dressed entirely in black, a simple and classic birdcage veil covering her eyes. Only a thin streak of blood-red lipstick breaks the Gothic nature of her appearance. The conversation is of Oum Kalthoum and Fairuz and Beirut, the beauty of the Arab world cherished in moments of musical memory.
We pass Le Bonaparte on Rue Guillaume Apollinaire, before heading into a confusing network of narrow streets and cobbled alleys lined with innumerable cafés and bistros. Their clientele face outwards
on a sea of tables and chairs, watching the world pass en masse and hogging seats for hours on end. We secure a table and drink Ricard, the conversation swinging like a pendulum between dreams and existence. As the night descends into cliché, we walk along the banks of the Seine to the festival’s opening party and a boat facing Notre Dame de Paris and the Île de la Cité. Shoufani’s scarf sparkles in the light thrown from street lamps while the assembled directors and producers make small talk and exchange cards.
The walk back to the Hôtel Aviatic on Rue de Vaugirard, between Saint-Germain-desPrés and Montparnasse, is long. Beautifully set within an 1856 townhouse, the hotel is within striking distance of the festival’s venue at Cinema Les 7 Parnassiens, where Shoufani’s lm is set to make it’s French debut the following day.
As with Brussels, the audience is smaller than hoped for when we arrive during the latter half of the afternoon, while the cinema itself has barely enough room for 70 people. Recognition, however, is soon in coming. Scott Hillier, who founded the festival in 2006 as a showcase for lms that demonstrate “quality, innovation and creativity in both form and content”, presents Shoufani with the festival’s Best Non-European Independent Documentary award the following evening, sending her on her way to Amsterdam and the Cinéma Arabe festival with a burgeoning sense of satisfaction.
Cramped and ever-threatened by water, Amsterdam’s ludicrously steep staircases and squashed gabled buildings are dif cult for a tall man to negotiate, an oddity that is made even stranger by the fact that the Dutch are the tallest people on earth. It is also a low-lying forest of bicycles, with all the bene ts and lunacy that that entails.
Of all the neighbourhoods, Jordaan is the most striking. It is also gorgeous in mid-spring. The once working-class area’s picturesque streets are lined with art galleries, restaurants and boutique shops, and as we walk eastwards from the Amsterdam Cheese Museum on Prinsengracht, across the bridge to Leliegracht, and on towards Centraal Station, we are sporadically abused by cyclists.
Almost nothing is pronounceable in Holland. At NDSM, a semi-industrial wasteland playing host to a city-sponsored art community, a Moroccan wedding party holds a photo shoot in front of an old, derelict tram. We pass a oating ower market on Singel canal, where tulips and narcissus waylay us for hours, before nally boarding a tram south towards the Rialto, an art-house cinema in Ceintuurbaan and the centre of all activity for the Cinéma Arabe festival. There, the violence, upheaval and catastrophe that is the Levant plays out within the tranquillity of Europe.
The Iraqi director Raad Mushatat, whose The Silence Of
The Shepherd opens the festival, is in the audience for the rst of Shoufani’s two screenings, and afterwards she is encircled and questioned for hours. Her existence “between fear and frustration, between truth and consequences, between dignity and survival, between money and love” has found its European audience.
Of all the neighbourhoods in Amsterdam, Jordaan is the most striking. It is also gorgeous in mid-spring