The fifth edition of the Dublin Arabic Film Festival will be held at the Irish Film Institute (IFI) today until Sunday, October 7th. The festival will showcase a total of six films during the brief, yet dazzlingly bright, period in which it will be running. This year’s festival, as usual, boasts an impressively broad, captivating programme that is set to inspire Dublin audiences over the weekend.
It must be said that the significance and effective power of festivals that provide a space for deeper cultural understanding to grow cannot be overstated. The Dublin Arabic Film Festival succeeds in cultivating this space for itself by granting an unmediated international platform to the most creative and talented of Arab filmmakers. It is undoubtedly hoped that their art will not only bring Dublin audiences a cinematic experience to be relished on a visceral level, but also encourage attitudinal evolution and a greater appreciation of the Arab world’s culture, history and people. However, the popularity and continued success of this festival since its inception in 2014 is testament to the already thriving cultural curiosity of Irish audiences. Inquisitiveness in wanting to learn more about diverse, unfamiliar walks of life has proven not to be a trait lacking among the filmgoers of Dublin in recent years. As a result, this festival has gone from strength to strength.
Opening the festival on this evening is Shirin Neshat’s Looking For Oum Kulthum, a film that explores the devastating consequences of single-mindedly following one’s own artistic muse at the expense of loved ones and personal wellbeing. It is a drama that also looks at the suffocating expectations that come with fame, and the existential challenges that stardom can cruelly present to those in its thrall. This film invites us to follow the journey of Mitra, an artist in her 40s, as she goes about the process of making a film about the much cherished and hallowed Egyptian singer Oum Kulthum. In a tragic turn of events, Mitra’s own fate becomes lethally aligned with the one that befell Oum Kulthum herself, as Mitra begins to implode both emotionally and artistically.
Oscar-nominated The Insult will also be featured at the festival. Ziad Doueiri’s masterful work captures the bitter, unflinching and grudge-bearing resolve of two men equally matched in their determination to defeat one another in a courtroom battle. This dispute ultimately proves to be emblematic of a wider conflict, one that blackened the lives of all people involved in it during the Lebanese Civil War. In the beginning, we, the audience find ourselves embroiled in what starts as a petty quarrel between a Palestinian foreman and a Lebanese Christian. However, we end up having been made a witness to barbaric violence and the senseless destruction that war brings. Doueiri uses a microscopic example of entrenched hatred boiling over due to a broken drainpipe as a device for investigating the enduring legacy of shattering conflict, and the perpetual threat that old, seething resentments will erupt once more at the slightest provocation. The Insult makes it abundantly clear that in this milieu there is something much more fundamentally broken than the drainpipe on which it finds its focus.
On the closing afternoon of the festival, Tala Hadid’s House in The Fields will be shown. House in The Fields is an in-depth, almost ethnographic, documentary that acquaints the viewer with an obscure village community in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco that has shied away from modernity. Intergenerational differences in the dreams and ambitions of the village community is of paramount thematic importance to this film. We see this as the younger subjects of the documentary seek approval from their elders, for plans to lead lives that are at total odds with the remoteness of their sheltered community. House in The Fields offers an unhurried, contemplative snapshot of a community struggling for, and with, its own existence in light of rapid social and political change.
Currently serving as Dublin Arabic Film Festival president, Jim Sheridan writes in his festival’s introduction note that “the filmmaking of the Arab speaking world is remarkably rich and steeped in history, and the films selected for this year’s festival represent a flavour of the best current Arab cinema has to offer”. What Sheridan and the organisers of this festival must be congratulated on, above all else, is making sure the flavour of Arab cinema is as striking as can be. In a world where people’s cultures are too often lazily misrepresented and insensitively distorted, whether in the media or in politics, the Dublin Arabic Film Festival hands us a refreshing antidote to this phenomenon by simply allowing Arab people to tell their stories in their own way, on their own terms.
