new voices in arab cinema (excerpt)

8/9/2019 New Voices in Arab Cinema (excerpt)

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V O I

C E S I N

A R A B

C I N E M

A N E W

Roy

Armes



Contents

Acknowledgments xi

List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction

. Characteristics of the New Cinema

. Te Filmmakers Te New Importance of Women Filmmakers Questions of Identity raining

Funding A Cosmopolitan Generation

. Documentary Palestine Lebanon

Egypt and the Maghreb Iraq Syria

. Feature Filmmaking Algeria

Morocco unisia Egypt Lebanon Palestine Iraq Syria

Te Gulf

Notes

Bibliography

Index



Te Filmmakers

N B has pointed out the signicance o the June Arab de eator his own generation o lmmakers, who were born in the s and madetheir breakthrough in the s. Te generation born since and makingits breakthrough in the s is very differently placed. Tese lmmakers wereeither small children or not yet born in . Te shared political experiencesshaping their lives have been the Yom Kippur War in ; the outbreak o thefeen-year civil war in Lebanon in ; the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which be-gan in ; the successive assaults by Israeli orces on both Palestine and Leba-non; and the two Palestinian inti adas. As a result o the upheavals caused bythese wars, many o the lmmakers have shared the experience o voluntary oren orced exile, ofen beginning in childhood or adolescence.

Teir individual national experiences differ greatly, however. In the Maghreb,the new lmmakers constitute the rst generation born afer independence, butthey have also experienced the rise o Islamic undamentalism and li e underofen brutal dictatorships. In Lebanon, they grew up in the midst o seeminglyinterminable civil conict and constant repetitions o oreign invasion and oc-cupation, extending up to the -Day War o . In Palestine, they experienced

the continual tightening o Israeli rule, the Palestinian response to this (the twointi adas), and more recently, the blockade o Gaza and its bombardment in .In Syria and Iraq, those whose parents had not been driven into exile grew upunder Baath party rule and experienced at rst hand the constraints imposed bythe tyrannies o Ha ez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein.

Tere are also cultural distinctions separating this new generation rom theprevious one. Te world has changed since the mid- s. alking o her senseo the difference between her own work and that o Nouri Bouzid and FeridBoughedir ( ourteen and feen years older than she is, respectively), the uni-sian lmmaker Nadia El Fani has said: “Tis difference is based on the act thatI belong to a generation that listened to rock and roll; we experienced the s.Tere is a small gap between their generation and mine; there was no smoothtransition between the two.”



| New Voices in Arab Cinema

Tere is work o real distinction to be ound in the lms o the s new-comers, but much o the output is, in stylistic terms, airly conservative. Only aew o the lmmakers have adopted styles that compare with the narrative inno-

vation to be ound, or example, in the work o their Francophone West A ricancontemporaries, such as Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, or Abder-rahmane Sissako. At the same time, though a number o the younger directorshave made telelms or broadcast transmission, there has been no breakthroughto truly popular orms o the kind exemplied by the “Nollywood” home videodramas o Nigeria. Equally, none o the younger lmmakers outside o Egypt hasollowed the example o Jocelyne Saab and made a mainstream Egyptian movie.Te French notion o the individual lmmaker, seen legally as the author (auteur )

o the lm, seeking acclaim and establishing a reputation at international lmestivals, remains the norm, as do oreign unding and co-production.

Te New Importance o Women FilmmakersUntil the mid- s women made up little more than percent o the total num-ber o eature lmmakers in the Maghreb, and there were even ewer womeneature directors active in the Middle East. Afer the very real contributions oArab women to the (expatriate dominated) beginnings o Egyptian lmmaking, very ew women were given the opportunity to direct a eature lm. Sometimesthe exclusions are staggering. No woman was given employment as a directorwithin any o the successive Algerian state lm production organizations. Tetwo Algerian women pioneers, the prize-winning novelist Assia Djebar (electedto the Académie Française in ) and her ellow writer Ha sa Zinaï-Koudileach made just a single eature, in and , respectively. But both Djebar’sLa nouba and Zinaï-Koudil’sWoman as the Devil were mm works producedby Algerian television (R A). Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’sRachida in wasthere ore the rst mm eature lm or cinema release to be directed by an Al-

gerian woman, and though the lmmaker hersel is resident in Algeria, all theproduction nancing or this work came rom France. Te three other Algerian-born women to make a breakthrough in the s, Yamina Benguigui, DjamilaSahraoui, and Nadia Cherabi-Labidi, are all French based and French unded.A similar pioneering role has been lled in Syrian documentary production byanother Paris-based woman lmmaker, Hala al-Abdallah Yakoub.

But in Morocco, unisia, and Lebanon, conditions in the s have beenmore avorable, and women make up about a quarter o all new directors. Sev-eral o these have already shown striking originality o tone and subject matter.Most ocus largely on aspects o women’s lives in the Arab world, and they ofenbring to this subject matter a quite novel perspective. But they by no means orma unied group, and indeed, their principal characteristic is perhaps their verydiversity.



Te Filmmakers |

Virtually all the women born in the s and s who have made a ctionaleature have lived, worked, and/or trained abroad. Tere is no single pattern oentry to lmmaking, but it is notable that none o them has had the conventional,sheltered upbringing reserved or so many women in the Arab world. Amongthose rom the Middle East, or example, the Palestinians Annemarie Jacir,Najwa Najjar, and Cherien Dabis and the Lebanese Dahna Abourahme, alllearned their lmmaking in the United States, where they were brought up. TeLebanese eature director Danielle Arbid has lived all her adult li e in Paris. Hercompatriots, Sabine El Gemayel and Dima El-Horr, both studied in Canada andworked initially in the United States be ore completing a rst eature. Amongthe Syrian women lmmakers, the Canadian-born Ruba Nadda studied in New

York. Waha al-Raheb may have had a conventional European-style lm training,studying at the Université de Paris VIII, but as the daughter o a diplomat, she wasborn in Cairo and went to school in cities as varied as Moscow and Khartoum.Nadine Labaki is the only s Middle Eastern woman eature lmmaker tohave studied exclusively at home, in her case at IESAV in Beirut.

Te Maghrebian women lmmakers born since belong to the rst gen-eration born since their countries achieved independence, yet a remarkable num-ber o them live in France or were trained there. Te key exception is the rst tobegin a eature lm, Imane Mesbahi, who was born in . Te daughter o thepioneer Moroccan director Ahmed Mesbahi, in two o whose eatures she ap-peared as a child, she is the only Maghrebian woman lmmaker to have studiedat the Cairo Higher Cinema Institute. She began her rst eature,Te Paradise ofthe Poor / Le paradis des pauvres in , but it was not released until andhad little success. wo other Maghrebian women lmmakers, who were bornin France to immigrant amilies, Nadia El Fani and Zakia ahiri, went straightinto the lm industry, El Fani as assistant director and ahiri initially as an ac-tress. Others born in France, among them Karin Albou and two lesser-known

Moroccan-born lmmakers, Stéphanie Duvivier and Aicham Losri, ollowed themore usual pattern or uture eature lmmakers, o ormal lm study in Paris.raining in France or Belgium was also the preparation sought by the our

women eature lmmakers, all born to middle-class amilies in the Maghreb,who went on to make the greatest impact on Maghrebian audiences (and, in someinstances, on the censors as well). Te unisian Raja Amari and three Moroccans,Yasmine Kassari, Narjiss Nejjar, and Laïla Marrakchi, have all used to the ull thenew perspective on Arab women’s lives which living in Europe has given them.In some cases, their approaches to issues such as class and sexuality are closer to

their French contemporaries (with whom they had, in some cases, studied) thanto traditional attitudes in the Maghreb. Te result in unisia and Morocco hasbeen uproar, especially rom male critics, notoriety or the lmmakers, and ofen,considerable commercial success or their lms.




O the feen or so women lmmakers who have made eature-length docu-mentaries, mostly in video, only the Moroccan Dalila Ennadre lacks a universityeducation and learned her skills working as a production assistant in variouscountries. Otherwise the new women documentarists tend to be university-educated but to lack ormal lm training, though a hand ul did pursue ormallm studies. Dalia Fathallah ollowed her academic studies in Beirut and ourswith a period at FEMIS in Paris. Dahna Abourahme trained in documentary pro-duction in New York, while Annemarie Jacir studied lm at Columbia Univer-sity. Rima Essa studied lmmaking in Jerusalem, while Éliane Raheb and ZeinaDaccache both ollowed courses at IESAV in Beirut. But many o the new womendocumentary lmmakers have had a very different prelude to lmmaking. Te

Moroccan Leila Kilani studied sociology in Paris. Ula abari studied theatre andthe visual arts be ore appearing as an actress in several lms and working as as-sistant director on Samir’sForget Baghdad. Te United States–based Jackie ReemSalloum studied ne art at Eastern Michigan and New York Universities. MaryseGargour obtained a doctorate in in ormation sciences in Paris and worked as a journalist there and in Beirut. May Oday and Suha Arra also worked initially as journalists.

Tis mass o educated and articulate women has changed the way in whicha whole array o aspects o Arab society are experienced and depicted. O -ten the changes are subtle, and in no case is there an attempt to romanticizewomen’s lives or to avoid criticism where this is due. But there is a new per-spective, which is most evident in the treatment o women’s sexuality. Here,the closer a lmmaker is to France, the more openness tends to be displayed.Tose who were born in France (such as Nadia El Fani or Karin Albou) or havelived in Paris since their teens (Danielle Arbid) are quite unsel -conscious indepicting women’s desires and portraying their naked bodies. Ofen even thosewho have merely studied in France (such as Raja Amari and Laïla Marrakchi)

develop ways o depicting women’s lives which are troubling to local censors.Tis is a ar cry rom the traditional Arab male approach o equating sexualityand rustration.

Questions o Identity Outside Egypt, contemporary Arab cinema as a whole can be broadly character-ized as a nomadic cinema, and it is no longer possible to make any kind o simpleequation between a lmmaker’s place o birth, his or her place o residence, andthe sources o production nancing. Since exile, permanent or temporary, volun-tary or en orced, plays such a large part in the lives o these lmmakers, the issueo nationality is complex. Tis is particularly so with respect to those belongingto the second generation o exiles, who have been born abroad.



Te Filmmakers |

Te documentary lmmaker Omar al-Qattan, who was born in , con-siders these issues in an article titled “Te Challenges o Palestinian Filmmaking( – ).” He is rank about his own background:

I was born into a wealthy amily, to Palestinian parents, in Beirut. I cameto the UK at the age o and have been here ever since. I think and writein three languages. More importantly, I have never lived in a re ugee camp,have never been hungry, have never personally been dispossessed, have neversuffered physical injury as a result o military oppression and so on.

So what, he asks, makes him a Palestinian lmmaker: “my amily origins, nostal-gia, political commitment?” Te answer he gives is one which could apply (withrespect to their own countries) to many other lmmakers—Lebanese, Syrian, orIraqi—living in the Arab diaspora:

Being Palestinian or engaging with the Palestinian cause has been andcontinues to be a process, not an absolute given, where I as an individualam constantly reviewing and revisiting my relationship with the Palestinianpeople, their struggle, their land, their memories, and so on. Tis relation-ship is always problematic.

For those Palestinians whose parents were not orced into exile, who wereborn within Israeli borders and are there ore Israeli citizens, there are otherproblems o identity. As Elia Suleiman has said,

We Palestinians living in Israel are the shy ones. Te inhibited. We act as iwe were closet-case Palestinians. Our Palestinian sisters and brothers in theWest Bank and Gaza generally ignite uprisings rst and then we join in. . . .It is our sisters and brothers who keep reminding us o our silent and tragicexistence.

Tere are ofen tensions with Palestinians living outside Israel’s borders, withoccasional accusations o “collaboration” i they seek unding rom Israeli statelm-support organizations (which, as Israeli citizens, they are per ectly entitledto do).

At the same time, or many Jewish citizens o Israel, Palestinian Arabs arenot regarded as “real Israelis.” Tis attitude is reected in a dictionary o Israelicinema published in Paris as recently as . Although dozens o trivial Israelilms are dealt with, the only Palestinian given his own entry is Mohamed Bakri(listed, o course, as an actor). Te author, Hélène Schoumann, devotes just twoand a hal pages to the whole Palestinian lm output, writing dismissively:

Palestinian cinema struggles to make its voice heard, despite its lack oresources. . . . it would need only little to grow and nally nd its true place.Already a ew prizes awarded at international estivals have encouraged it.




Similarly, a two-DVD history o Israeli cinema, published in the Arte Édi-tions series “Voyage à travers le cinéma,” makes no mention o Palestinian lm-making in its introduction, includes only Mohamed Bakri (again as an actor) inthe list o “lm personalities,” and includes an extract rom only one Palestinianlm, awk Abu Wael’sTirst. Tese are attitudes this current study sets out tore ute absolutely.

European and US lm estivals also exacerbate issues relating to identity. Asar as A rican and Arab estivals (such as FESPACO and the JCC) go, a claimedPalestinian identity is unproblematic. But in Europe and the United States, thereare ofen problems. Nizar Hassan tells the story o the difficulties which aroseafer his lm,Invasion, was selected or an INPU con erence to be held in Bar-

celona. He dened himsel as Palestinian, but this caused the organizers hugeproblems because Palestine is not a country. First, Hassan was categorized as arepresentative o “the Rest o the World,” but this did not offer a way to providethe unding necessary or him to attend. He was then redened simply as an Is-raeli (an identity which he strenuously denied), and then, quite bizarrely, he waslisted as an A ghan. Only afer weeks o email correspondence was he able to gethimsel dened ormally as a Palestinian. In a similar vein, in the United Statesthe lm Divine Intervention, directed by Elia Suleiman (who similarly deneshimsel as Palestinian), “provoked opposition to its submission or the entry asthe Foreign Language Oscar, since Palestine was not a country.”

Another area in which there are parallel—i somewhat different—concernsabout identity is Iraq. Because o the violent political upheavals in the South,most o the Iraqi lm production in the s has occurred in the relatively moretranquil area o Iraqi Kurdistan, and much o this has been produced by ethnicKurdish directors. In talking about Iraqi lm production, it is impossible to ig-nore lmmakers as signicant as Hiner Saleem or Shawkat Amin Korki, thoughthey are, by denition, not Arabs. Here, as elsewhere in this book—in dealing

with second-generation Arab exiles, or example—I have tried to be as liberalas possible. For me, the dual identity—Kurd in terms o allegiance, yet Iraqi interms o state identity—is simply another example o the multiple, ofen conict-ing identities so common in the Middle East. I am heartened by the act thatthere is no overt hostility in the lms I have seen. Saleem’sKilometer Zero, orexample, is built around the gul in mutual understanding between an Arab anda Kurd, but the Arab taxi driver is by no means caricatured or belittled.

Te relationship between lmmaker and homeland will clearly vary rom in-dividual to individual, rom country to country, and it is difficult to make clear-

cut decisions on specic nationality. But wherever they live, the lmmakers dealtwith here retain deep ties with the place they identi y as their homeland. Tesituation is well captured by a quotation ( rom Anton Shammas) which KamalAlja ari includes inTe Roof: “And you know per ectly well that we don’t ever



Te Filmmakers |

leave home—we simply drag it behind us wherever we go, walls, roo and all.”Te link between lmmaker and country, whether shaped by personal memories,passed-down parental recollections, or simply the workings o the lmmaker’sown imagination, is ofen one o the most important keys to the work produced.

Similar kinds o questions haunt both those born abroad to immigrant orexile parents and those who have themselves chosen, or been driven into, exile.Nabil Ayouch, who was born and brought up in Paris o mixed Maghrebian de-scent, has explained:

France gave me a culture, an education, principles and values, but not anidentity and certainly no roots. Morocco gave me the beginnings o an iden-tity and roots, some replies to my questioning, but in a society which I couldneither understand nor grasp, and in which I elt mysel to be a stranger.

Abbas Fahdel, who lef Iraq to study abroad at the age o eighteen, makes theparallel situation very clear in the opening voice-over oReturn to Babylon. Os-tensibly designed so that he could meet up with amily and riends, the purposeo his journey is actually “to make peace with that part o mysel that remains orever attached to my homeland.”

In dening nationality I have relied here largely on the lmmakers’ own as-sertions and on the (admittedly very liberal) criteria o the various Arab lmestivals. Arab cinema, as it is presented here, is largely the product o Arabs liv-ing locally or in exile, but a number o the most interesting lmmakers are thechildren o mixed marriages—having a French mother and a Maghrebian ather,or example. In addition, there are ascinating contributions by Kurds and by theoccasional Armenian or Arabic-speaking Jew, born, brought up, or living in theconnes o the wider Arab world.

raining

Te training these lmmakers have received has been largely international, not atall ocused on specic Arab issues and priorities. wo uture Lebanese directorsactually managed to work or their Hollywood heroes. Samir Habchi trained un-der Francis Ford Coppola in Hollywood, and Ziad Doueiri ollowed his studiesat UCLA with work in Hollywood, most notably as camera assistant to Quentinarantino. But most potential lmmakers have had to rely on ormal training.

About hal o the new s lmmakers are lm school trained, but onlyhal a dozen or so received their training in an Arab or Middle Eastern context.

Arab lmmakers rom outside Egypt continue to turn their backs on the CairoHigher Cinema Institute. As has been noted, only one Arab woman lmmakero this generation, the Moroccan Imane Mesbahi, trained there. Five other lm-makers who did not to go to Europe, the ormer Soviet Union, or North America




or their training are Nadine Labaki, Zeina Daccache, and Simon El Habre, whoall studied in Beirut; Massoud Ari Salih, who trained in Kurdistan; and awkAbu Wael, who studied at el Aviv University.

Te most avored training location in Europe has been Paris. Among thosewho have studied there are the Algerian Malek Bensmaïl; the Moroccans FaouziBensaïdi, Omar Chraïbi, Souad El Bouhati, Stéphanie Duvivier, Mohamed AliEl Mejoub, Hicham Alhayat, Kamal Kamal, Ismaïl Ferroukhi, Laïla Marrakchi,Narjiss Nejjar, Mohamed Chri ribeck, and Nour-Eddine Lakhmari (who alsostudied in Norway); the unisians Karin Albou, Raja Amari, Elyes Baccar, Mok-tar Ladjimi, and Moez Kamoun; the Lebanese documentarists Maher Abi Samraand Hady Zaccak; and the Syrian Waha al-Raheb. Another Syrian, Joud Saeed,

also studied in France, but at the Université Louis Lumière in Lyon.wo Moroccans, Hassan Legzouli and Yasmine Kassari, studied at the Bel-gian lm school, INSAS. Te Moroccan Mohamed Zineddaine studied in Bolo-gna and his compatriot Hicham Alhayat in Geneva. Mohamed al-Daradji trainedin Holland and the United Kingdom, and Kamal Alja ari in Cologne. Jose Fareslearned lmmaking in Sweden, where he began his career with a comedy aboutthe local Lebanese community. Koutaïba al-Janabi studied in Budapest. Amonggraduates rom the Moscow lm school, the VGIK, in the ormer Soviet Union,are two Syrians ( ollowing the national tradition), Nidal al-Dibs and Khatib ElBassel; one Iraqi, Zahavi Sanjavi; and one Lebanese, Samir Habchi. Tose trainedin the United States include the Moroccans Hakim Belabbes and Saïd Nouri;the Palestinian trio o Annemarie Jacir, Najwa Najjar, and Cherien Dabis; twoLebanese, Ziad Doueiri and Assad Fouladkar; and the Paris-based Algerian, Na-dir Moknèche. Te unisian Naw el Saheb-Ettaba and three Lebanese directors,Sabine El Gemayel, Dima El-Horr, and Mahmoud Kaabour, received their train-ing in Canada. Te Moroccan Mohamed Ahed Bensouda also trained there, afercompleting his studies at the Sorbonne.

O the remainder, a number studied drama: thebeurs Chad Chenouga, AzizeKabouche, and Lyèce Boukhitine; the unis-born Abdellati Kechiche and NéjibBelkadhi; the Algerian Lyes Salem; the Moroccans Yassine Fenane and Zakiaahiri; and the Lebanese Wajdi Mouawad. A very ew o the others avoidedlm school and ollowed the traditional lm industry pattern o working ini-tially as production assistants, assistant directors, or editors. Among these arethe Palestinian Hany Abu Assad, the Moroccan Jérôme Cohen Olivar, and theFrench-based unisian Nadia El Fani. Others adopted less conventional paths:the Lebanese Danielle Arbid and the Moroccan Hamid Faridi came rom jour-

nalism, the Algerian Rabah Ameur-Zaïmèche and Moroccan Leila Kilani stud-ied sociology, and Mourad Bouci was engaged in community work; AbdelilahBadr was a martial arts specialist in Belgium, where Ismaël Saidi worked as apolice inspector.




rom the South, have been particularly important or the development o Arabcinema. Nadine Labaki, or example, proted rom a Cannes Film Festival proj-ect, which allowed her to spend six months in Paris, scriptingCaramel, whileNajwa Najjar received unding rom the Amiens Scriptwriting Award and par-ticipated in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab while preparingPomegranates and Myrrh. Danielle Arbid obtained a bursary rom the Montpellier estival to helpher script In the Battleelds. Just like Heiny Srour in , Nadir Moknèche’ssuccess in setting up his rst eature, Madame Osmane’s Harem, in , wasaided by winning a French scriptwriting contest. In the credits orSalt of TisSea, Annemarie Jacir acknowledges the aid o no less than our organizationsunding or tutoring scriptwriting: the Paul Robeson Foundation, Sundance

Screenwriters Lab, Paris Cinema Project, and Berlinale Co-Production & alentProject Market.

A Cosmopolitan GenerationTe lmmakers born since constitute, by any criterion, a cosmopolitan gen-eration. Dima El-Horr’s sel -denition, “I dream in Arabic, speak English andwrite and read in French,” encapsulates their shared existence. Nadia El Fanihas elaborated this in terms o unisian intellectuals:

In the unis that I know, people speak Arabic and French; that’s how weare. . . . We experience things differently because we are just as much at homethere as we are here. . . . We have assimilated both cultures and ultimately Isee it as a blessing.

Malek Bensmaïl has speculated on whether the use, by members o the youngergeneration, o titles with wider connotations ( eguia’sRome Rather than You orhis ownChina Is Still a Long Way Away, or example) or lms whose contentis exclusively Algerian, is a reection o oreign nancing or simply “reects a

population which wants to leave.”Although many o them speak admiringly o Yousse Chahine, in his lateryears very much an outsider in relation to mainstream Egyptian cinema, thereis no sense in which these lmmakers are shaped by the history o Arab cin-ema. Asked about which lmmakers had inuenced him most, awk Abu Wael,or example, named François ruffaut, Andrei arkovsky, Bernardo Bertolucci,Ingmar Bergman, and Martin Scorsese. Jilani Saadi, asked about his lm tastes,replied with re erences to neorealism, Pasolini, arkovsky, and Ettore Scola.Responding to a Sight and Sound poll o “best directors,” Mohamed Souweidlisted arkovsky, Bresson, Fassbinder, Pasolini, Ford, Cassavetes, Antonioni,Sirk, Hitchcock, and Bergman. Te Egyptian independent Ibrahim El Batout re-used to concede that he had been inuenced by any other director, but offered athoroughly eclectic list o his avorites: Krzyszto Kieslowśki, Alejandro Iñárritu,



Te Filmmakers |

Wim Wenders, Emir Kusturica, Yousse Chahine, and Shadi Abdel Salam. Tiswas matched by his contemporary Ahmad Abdalla, who named Teo Angelo-poulos, Paul Tomas Anderson, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Kim Ki-duk, and Mike Leighas the key lmmakers or him.

Te Lebanese Nadine Labaki is one o the ew Arab lmmakers o her gen-eration not to be trained abroad, but asked about the sources o the style oWhereDo We Go Next? she said it was inuenced byGrease and also by lms she sawas a child, such asSnow White and Cinderella. Te Syrian Khatib El Bassel hastranslated the autobiographies o Andrei arkovsky and Ingmar Bergman. LaïlaMarrakchi has re erred to a range o (largely recent) Hollywood lms as inu-ences on her rst eature: ‘Seeing over and over the teen movies o my childhood,

like American Graffiti, Te Breakfast Club, Rebel without a Cause, Te Outsiders, and Rumblesh, gave me the courage to start writing on this subject. Likewise,Raja Amari has spoken o her closeness to the new French cinema o FrançoisOzon and Arnaud Despleschin—lmmakers who attended the same courses atFEMIS in Paris.

As ar as the Maghreb is concerned, the bulk o the lmmakers—even thoseregarded as part o thebeur community—were born in the countries whose na-tionality they claim. But a number o the Maghrebians (Karin Albou, Nadia ElFani, Zakia ahiri, Nabil and Hichem Ayouch among them) were born in Paris,though in some cases they lived there only or a short period o time (sometimes just a matter o months). Te birthplaces o a number o the new Middle Easternlmmakers reect the realities o the Arab diaspora. O the Syrians, Waha al-Raheb was born in Cairo, Ruba Nadda in Montreal, Soudade Kaadan in Paris, andKhatib El Bassel in the Netherlands. Among the Lebanese, Dahna Abourahmewas born in Jordan, Michel Kammoun in Sierra Leone, and Chadi Zeneddinein Gabon. Te Egyptian Ate Hetata was born in New York. In addition, aswe have seen, several leading Palestinian women directors were born abroad:

Annemarie Jacir in Saudi Arabia and Cherien Dabis and Najwa Najjar in theUnited States. An extreme case is Yahya Alabdallah: though generally describedas a Palestinian-Jordanian, he was born in Libya, brought up initially in SaudiArabia, established his production base in Jordan, and received co-productionunding rom Dubai or his rst eature.

new voices in arab cinema (excerpt)

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