A revealing new season of films at the Ica looks at the links between religion and revolt
Do the roots of the Arab spring lie in cinema? The question seems absurd: surely kleptocratic dictatorship, youth unemployment and grain prices all played a more important part. Iranian film scholar Hamid Dabashi disagrees: "If you want to understand the emotive universe from which the Arab spring arose, cinema is a good place to start. Look at a film like Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention: there the director spits out an apricot pit at an Israeli tank and blows it up. The scene is both fantasy and prophecy."
Dabashi will be speaking this month at Winds of Change, a series of talks and screenings at the Ica in London showcasing films from across the Muslim world; it hopes to explore the rich, sometimes fraught relationship between religion and civic society. Özer Kiziltan's...
Do the roots of the Arab spring lie in cinema? The question seems absurd: surely kleptocratic dictatorship, youth unemployment and grain prices all played a more important part. Iranian film scholar Hamid Dabashi disagrees: "If you want to understand the emotive universe from which the Arab spring arose, cinema is a good place to start. Look at a film like Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention: there the director spits out an apricot pit at an Israeli tank and blows it up. The scene is both fantasy and prophecy."
Dabashi will be speaking this month at Winds of Change, a series of talks and screenings at the Ica in London showcasing films from across the Muslim world; it hopes to explore the rich, sometimes fraught relationship between religion and civic society. Özer Kiziltan's...
- 9/20/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
By Michael Atkinson
Just in time for the holidays, particularly Chanukah and Eid al-Adha (okay, that was a few weeks ago), here come two new Mideast films that quietly tear into the bilious, ruinous hypocrisies of fundamentalist religion. It's an ironic conflict from where we stand: nothing is as ripe and ready for the firing squad as reactionary religious discipline, and yet few social codes are as ubiquitous. What's more, they all somehow demand "respect." Outside of most neighborhoods in most American and European metropoli, you can hardly throw an Orwell paperback without hitting and infuriating a narrow-minded fundamentalist, and I suppose how you measure the attack-mode nuts of David Volach's "My Father My Lord" (2007) and Özer Kiziltan's "Takva: A Man's Fear of God" (2006) depends on how strenuously you feel the press of "extreme tradition" (my phrase!) in your own life. The movies seem from a New Yorker's perspective to go gently,...
Just in time for the holidays, particularly Chanukah and Eid al-Adha (okay, that was a few weeks ago), here come two new Mideast films that quietly tear into the bilious, ruinous hypocrisies of fundamentalist religion. It's an ironic conflict from where we stand: nothing is as ripe and ready for the firing squad as reactionary religious discipline, and yet few social codes are as ubiquitous. What's more, they all somehow demand "respect." Outside of most neighborhoods in most American and European metropoli, you can hardly throw an Orwell paperback without hitting and infuriating a narrow-minded fundamentalist, and I suppose how you measure the attack-mode nuts of David Volach's "My Father My Lord" (2007) and Özer Kiziltan's "Takva: A Man's Fear of God" (2006) depends on how strenuously you feel the press of "extreme tradition" (my phrase!) in your own life. The movies seem from a New Yorker's perspective to go gently,...
- 12/23/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
- Ask me what the 1,800 voting members of the European Film Academy will choose as their top film of the year and I'd confidently say: the Romanian pic that won over Cannes. Ask me what the same jury will choose as the top film from a first time filmmaker and I could say it will be a film about a musical band. That is because out of the four choices, I'm guessing that Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit and Anton Corbijn's Control have about an equal chances on this award. The other two noms are Gegenüber (Counterparts) by Jan Bonny from Germany and A Man’s Fear of God by Özer Kiziltan. The four debut films nominated for European Discovery of 2007 were determined by a committee comprised of Fipresci (the International Federation of Film Critics) members Jacob Neiiendam (Denmark), Marco Lombardi (Italy) and Dana Linssen (the Netherlands), and
- 9/27/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
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