Just 100 miles from Hollywood, this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival offers an oasis of Middle Eastern cinema.
Set in the Coachella Valley, strangely reminiscent of the MENA region, with date palms and desert scenery, the festival is often a focal point for bold new Middle Eastern films seeking American distribution.
Amid the star-studded glamour of this year’s festival, with the likes of Isabella Rossellini and Nicole Kidman gracing the red carpet on opening night, new films from across the region provide valuable insights into a part of the world that Hollywood often gets wrong.
Fittingly, this year’s programme focuses on films about the Palestinian, Syrian, and Iranian experiences – both at home and in the diaspora.
“I think this year’s selection of films from the MENA region,” says programmer Alissa Simon to The New Arab, “really puts faces to the news from the region.”
Indeed, many of the programming choices seem particularly prescient. From the new resonance Ghost Trail – a film about the search for Syrian war criminals abroad – which takes on added significance after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, to the collection of short films from Gaza called From Ground Zero, to the prize-winning Israeli/Palestinian documentary No Other Land (about the besieged residents of the West Bank), there is a real sense of cinéma vérité.
The new feature film Happy Holidays – a Palestinian/German/French/Italian/Qatari co-production – is a four-part family drama about Palestinians in Haifa that deftly captures the experience of so-called “Israeli-Arabs.”
Meanwhile, To a Land Unknown, winner of the SACD Prize at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, offers insight into the no-man’s land of Middle Eastern migrants in Greece.
Iranian films of note include The Seed of a Sacred Fig, about a judge in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court who faces simmering rebellion from his wife and daughters at home.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is intriguingly an adaptation of Azar Nafisi’s book about a professor who secretly discusses forbidden Western classics with her female students in post-Revolutionary Iran, while Canadian director Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language – shortlisted for Best International Feature Film for the 97th Academy Awards – reimagines a snowy Winnipeg where French and Farsi are the official languages.
Rather improbably, and in a way that speaks to the festival’s role as a kind of cinematic Californian Pugwash uniting disparate cultures, there is even the US premiere of a Georgian/Israeli/Iranian production called Tatami, based on the story of the 2019 incident in which Iranian judoka Saeid Mollaei was ordered to throw matches at the World Judo Championships to avoid facing Israeli Sagi Muki.
Indeed, at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, even closer to Disneyland than Hollywood, it is a small world after all.
Intriguingly, as I consumed a banquet of regional cinematic fare, I noticed that, in addition to offering insight into the Middle Eastern experience, the films also spoke to the pervasive influence of Hollywood. After all, (and as a Canadian, I certainly can attest to this) perhaps everywhere – not just Palm Springs – is only 100 miles from Hollywood.
Consider the epic series of shorts made by filmmakers in Gaza – From Ground Zero – curated by Gazan-born Rashid al Masharawi via his foundation to support emerging filmmakers.
Palestine’s official entry for the Oscars manages to capture the emotional truth of life in a war zone. While it often feels claustrophobic, relentless, and even monotonous, it’s punctuated by fleeting moments of transcendence through music, humour, and memories of days gone by.
Tied together by the omnipresent sounds of Israeli drones, a beautiful soundtrack by Iraqi oud player and UNESCO Ambassador for Peace, Naseer Shamma, and the ever-present ghosts of ’48, the 22 short films offer a gritty tapestry of life in Gaza and a testament to the human spirit.
In Hana Awad’s No, a preternaturally happy group of musicians use positivity amidst despair as an act of self-defence, wielding joy as a weapon.
Jad And Natalie by Aws Al-Banna, channels Romeo and Juliet, as a young actor tours the rubble where his dead fiancée lies after an IDF bomb destroyed her home.
In Taxi Waneesa, a tale of a taxi driver whose faithful, cart-pulling donkey refuses to leave him behind when he is killed in an explosion, filmmaker E’temad Weshah breaks the fourth wall.
Appearing before the film finishes, she announces that, instead of completing the short, after her brother was killed by bombing, she decided to leave it unfinished as a “testament.”
And in Soft Skin by Khamees Masharawi, the documentary and animation offer a Gazan children’s perspective, as they write their names on their bodies for identification in case they are killed by indiscriminate bombing.
While Italian neo-realism is undoubtedly an influence – From Ground Zero is also Altmanesque – as if the famed director lay down one day with Kafka in Jabaliya.
After a while, all the stories and characters – Tamer Najm’s The Teacher, about a displaced professor, followed by Ahmed Al-Danf’s School Day, about a boy who travels daily to his dead teacher’s shrine – merge into a giant saga of loss and resistance. And while it evokes a televisual aesthetic – with the likes of 24 hours by Alaa Damo, which recounts via social media posts a Gazan man’s tale of being trapped under rubble in “safe” areas three times in a single day – it transcends it as well.
At times, it’s even reminiscent of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm (NB: Gazan humour is as dark as Russian Jewish), as seen in Nidal Damo’s Everything Is Fine, which recounts the tale of a stand-up comedian in Gaza who almost misses his gig for a group of wounded civilians in a refugee camp because the queue for showers is so long, and his makeshift shower comes under fire.
Or consider Kareem Satoum’s Hill of Heaven, a perfectly executed short that Larry David would be proud of, about a displaced man who finally gets a good night’s sleep in a stolen body bag.
Ghost Trail, which deftly captures the recent Syrian experience in a gripping scene where Hamid – a survivor of Sednaya prison – is invited to lunch in Strasbourg by his former torturer, and the two exiles speak in a kind of code, recalls aspects of The Marathon Man. Like Dustin Hoffman’s character, Hamid is a long-distance runner. There is a stabbing scene, and the Rhine stands in for the Hudson River.
And in To a Land Unknown, (like From Ground Zero, distributed by the Palestinian-owned Watermelon Pictures), the tale of the two Palestinian hustlers trapped in a migrant netherworld in Athens, who exploit Syrian refugees so they can obtain forged passports, seems to overtly reference another film starring Dustin Hoffman – namely Midnight Cowboy.
After their escape scheme – with Germany standing in for Florida – is thwarted, Chatila (played by Mahmoud Bakri) cradles his dying junkie cousin Reda (Aram Sabbah) – standing in for Jon Voight – as their dream of starting a café in Berlin sings a swan song.
Are they both being cradled by the long arm of Hollywood? Or does the scene speak to cinema’s universal language?
At the Palm Springs International Film Festival, where the desert night only offers silence and stories that transcend the evening news, it’s hard to tell.
Hadani Ditmars is the author of Dancing in the No Fly Zone and has been writing from and about the MENA since 1992. Her next book, Between Two Rivers, is a travelogue of ancient sites and modern culture in Iraq. www.hadaniditmars.com
