Global Peace Film Festival Entertaining Entries

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

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Published on Sunday, 01 May 2011 05:00

Written by Laura Blum

As the Global Peace Film Festival starts prepping its ninth run, September 20 to 25, 2011, in Orlando, Florida, filmmakers seeking to cool planetary passions have till May 6 to submit their creations. (May 20 is the late deadline, and June 3, the final web one.) Considering the year's "Days of Rage" alone, this forum dedicated to stories of peacemaking and environmental sustainability has its work cut out for it.

While the Middle East may be especially hot this year, GPFF prides itself on showcasing films from all six continents, as it has since its inception. Mexico, Finland, Tanzania, Peru, Israel and Palestine are but a half dozen of the 45 national backdrops featured on the last Festival slate.

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World Nomads Morocco Fest Film Series

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Published on Sunday, 01 May 2011 05:00

Written by FFestivalTraveler Staff

French Institute:Alliance Française (FIAF), under the High Patronage of His Majesty King Mohammed VI, presents World Nomads Morocco Festival, which runs April 30 - May 31, 2011 at the French Institute: Alliance Française (FIAF), Florence Gould Hall, and other venues in New York City.

The Festival includes CinémaTuesdays: Moroccan Cinéma, a series of Moroccan films showing weekly on Tuesday evenings between May 3 – 31, 2011.

A new generation of filmmakers has emerged in the past 10 years offering a fresh and bold cinematic voice, engaged with the complexities of present-day Morocco.

This series highlights contemporary issues that pervade artistic production in Morocco: the legacy of the years of political repression, undocumented workers’ migration to Europe, Casablanca as an urban metropolis, and Morocco’s increasing commitment to cultural diversity.

Featured titles include box office hits Casa Negra and Mektoub; works by masterful documentarians Hakim Belabbes with Those Hands, and Dalila Ennadre's new riveting engagement with the painful history of Moroccan women's involvement in the French Indochina war in I Loved So Much.

This program is curated by Livia Alexander and organized by ArteEast for the FIAF World Nomads Festival

Screenings are:

Tue, May 3:

Casa Negra
dir. Nour Eddine Lakhmari
starring Anas El Baz, Omar Lotfi, Mohamed Benbrahim
Set in modern-day Casablanca, two young men, childhood friends, strive to rise above their surrounding squalor. Not your grandfather‛s Casablanca. This highly controversial film was selected as the country’s entry to the 2010 Oscars.

May 10:

A Thousand Months
dir. Faouzi Bensaidi
starring Fouad Labied, Nezha Rahile, Mohamed Majd
Winner of two awards at Cannes, this beautifully wrought portrait of intergenerational conflict during Ramadan explores how faith, gender, and family so strongly shape the people we become as adults..

May 17 - Double screening:

Mokhtar
dir. Halima Ouardiri
starring Omar Belarbi, Abdellah Ichiki, S’fia Moussa
A boy’s discovery of an injured baby owl sparks a desire to care for it -- despite the local belief that owls are bad omens.

I Loved You So Much
dir. Dalila Ennadre
A Moroccan woman who was a prostitute for the French Legion a half-century ago, now wants the French government to recognize her as a veteran. A remarkable new vision of the ties between sex, war, and colonialism.

May 17:

The Dog’s Life of Juanita Narboni
dir. Farida Belyazid
starring Mariola Fuentes, Lou Doillon, Nadia Alami, Francisco Algora
Juanita is the last witness to the paradise that was international Tangier, set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the arrival of World War II refugees.

May 24:

These Hands
dir. Hakim Belabbes
In this informative and encouraging documentary, a Moroccan professor explores how old and new coexist in this country where, perhaps now more than ever, a tide of globalization is sweeping through its borders, traditions and society.

May 24 - Double screening:

H’rash
dir. Ismael El Maouala Al Iraki
starring Saïd Bey, Abderrahmane Oubihem, Mourad Zaoui, Saïd El Arabi.
An urban tale about an expert conman and his childhood friend, a nihilist drunk. Will Assad avenge the death of a woman he never met, or, will he use it to blackmail a corrupt cop to settle the debt of his friend?

Mektoub
dir. Nabil Ayouch
srtarring Rachid El Ouali, Faouzi Bensaïdi, Amal Chabli
A young couple’s life together is suddenly,horrifically interrupted when they are drugged and assaulted in Tangier. Upon recovering, the husband obsessively tracks down the attackers who permanently altered a once-comfortable existence.

May 31 - Double screening:

Short Life
dir. Adil El Fadili
starring Aziz Hattab, Malika Hammaoui, Aziz El Fadlli, Ismaïl Abouelkanater, Fatima-Ezzahra Bennasser, Mohammed Choubi
Zhar’s mother dies soon after giving birth to him, casting a shadow over his life that remains hard to shake. But he perseveres and, in doing so, bears witness to the growing pains that Morocco endures.

Do You Remember Adil?
dir. Mohamed Zineddaine
starring Salma Agoumi, Mohamed Ayad, Mamoun Belaaroussi
Adil leaves Casablanca to join his brother in Italy, soon realizing that Europe -- with its growing poverty and unemployment -- is far from the utopia he pictured.

The Man Who Sold the World
dir. Swel and Imad Noury
starring Said Bey, Fahd Benchamsi, Audrey Marnay
In a future time, a love triangle amongst a cabaret performer and two brotherly friends begins and unravels, causing madness and betrayal in one of the men involved. A dystopian, unique film inspired by Dostoyevsky and Beckett.

Tangerine Tales: Films and Videos from Cinémathèque de Tanger’s Archive

Since its inception, the Cinémathèque de Tanger has been dedicated to the collection and preservation of Moroccan and Arab film heritage, ranging from fiction to documentary, from home movies to video art and experimental cinema. This program offers a cross-section of films with the city at the heart of their cinematic ideas.

Highlights include:

• Arabs Love Cats, by Akram Zaatari
• Mounir Fatmi’s tribute to William Burroughs and Naked Lunch
• An American in Tangier: Paul Bowles, with an exploration of the city’s literary imagination and those who contributed to its invention
• the legendary figure of Mohamed Choukriin Perro Corazon
• Gabriel Veyre’s View of the Main Square and the Small Square, a short documentary which reveals an unknown Tangier while also depicting the colonial imaginary representations associated with the former international zone
• spontaneous fictional dimensions of the 2010 Cannes selection, Oliver Laxe‛s You Are All Captains

Tue, May 10 at 7pm
Sat, May 14 at 6pm

For more information, go to www.fiaf.org.

Cinéma Tuesdays: World Nomads Morocco
Tuesdays, May 3 – 31, 2011

French Institute: Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street
New York City

KINO! 2011: New Cinema from Germany

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

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Published on Friday, 29 April 2011 22:47

Written by Laura Blum

From the packed screenings at KINO! 2011, the Museum of Modern Art´s 32nd annual palooza of recent German cinema, you´d never know the Tribeca Film Festival was in full swing. The series, which brings a taste of the Teutonic to Midtown Manhattan (April 27 to May 2), is as happening as the German economy.

KINO! opened this year with Tom Tykwer’s latest work, Three. The trinity of the title is a married couple and the man both partners have a secret dalliance with. Perhaps best known for his propulsive 1998 hit Run Lola Run, Tykwer was unsure the sexy humor that made this 2010 seriocomedy such a hit back home would travel well. Pronouncing its New York premiere a “test screening” from which he´d forecast its potential stateside fortunes, the jaunty 40-something director returned alter the credits to entertain a lively Q&A, reassured by the near constant supply of audience guffaws during the preceding 119 minutes.

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