1967: A Review

May 18, 2008 – 6:07 am

This is a review of 1967 by Tom Segev. Translation: Jessica Cohen. Little Brown Book Group. Paperback Edition: 2008.

Tom Segev is the columnist of Ha’aretz, a left-wing Israeli newspaper, and a historian who chronicles the lives of Israelis in 1967.

Many of books have analyzed the roots of the Six-Day War and its significance to the history of the Middle East. Segev illustrates how the fear of another Holocaust drove Israel to launch wars against Egypt, Syria and Jordan, grabbing land and starting a tradition of excess.

If you believe in the mainstream discourse regarding the Six-Day War and in the image of an infallible Israel, you may not like this book. It is a book full of controversial ideas, and it makes harsh statements about the Jewish state.

Taking references from thousands of interviews, official and unofficial materials, Segev’s book distinguishes itself because of its reliance on materials both from archives and diaries of regular people. For example, the third section of the book was fully based on the diary of Private Yehoshua Bar-Dayan, who leaves his wife and son to join the army to prepare for war. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in arts and literature, palestine | Comments (0)

Rasha Mahdi: Egyptian Caricaturist

February 10, 2008 – 8:41 am

Rasha Mahdi has been described as the first female Egyptian caricaturist.

In her bio, Ms. Mahdi lists her mother as her source of support in pursuing her goals. She also lists her background in graphic design and advertising. She has done freelance work for a variety of Egyptian publications, so, if you’re in Egypt, she might already be familiar.

Mahdi looks like she is no friend of the George W. Bush administration, though she takes on other subjects just as freely (Osama Bin Laden, Brad Pitt, and Tony Blair among them – personally, I’m a big fan of the Brad Pitt caricature; considering the fact that this man’s perfectly chiseled face has been staring at me from every newsstand). Read More »

By Natalia Antonova | Posted in arts and literature, egypt, humor, muslim women | Comments (2)

Notes from the Dubai International Film Festival: Things We Lost in the Fire

December 18, 2007 – 8:39 am

This is our final article on DIFF this year. Related stories are here and here.

As the festival wound down, I found myself needing an injection of Hollywood, and Susanne Bier’s “Things We Lost in the Fire” was the ticket. Well, maybe. Susanne Bier is actually Danish, and this movie is somewhat unconventional. I’m not sure if it’s going to get a wide release in the Middle East, but I’m not holding my breath.

The one consistently terrific thing about this film is Benicio Del Toro and his brand of awesome. I’m not exactly sure how he manages to take the familiar role of a recovering heroin addict and transform it into something this charming and unpretentious, but I like to think it has something to do with being charming and unpretentious in real life. Either way, this is one performance any self-respecting Del Toro fangirl or fanboy cannot possibly miss out on, no matter where you are.

The rest of the movie oscillates between genuinely grounded, thoughtful material and occasionally coma-inducing melodrama. Halle Berry’s turn as shell-shocked widow Audrey is solid, but her obligatory moment of meltdown and surrender felt as thought it could have come off a check-list. While Del Toro’s heroin withdrawal scene has similar overtones, his inventive facial contortions alone create something original to watch.

David Duchovny, the dead husband who is the link between Berry and Del Toro’s characters, has some potential, but he disappears halfway into the film. The story is fragmented (much like a grieving person’s mind – which I thought to be a nice touch overall), and Duchovny’s character is seen in flashbacks. But the flashbacks just stop all of a sudden, and the film is the poorer for it. We understand that Brian was a righteous dude unjustly taken from his family in the prime of his life, but aside from the great dynamic he has with his drug addict friend, we don’t really get to know him as a human being.

The deadpan John Carroll Lynch is a source of comic relief as a weird but good-natured neighbor, but it’s a bad sign when you realize his character is actually more likeable than Brian’s.

Bier is drawing a fascinating parallel between addiction and grief however, and she does succeed in raising serious questions about the way human beings deal with both phenomena. Read More »

By Natalia Antonova | Posted in arts and literature, dubai, entertainment | Comments (0)

Notes from the Dubai International Film Festival: Captain Abu Raed

December 15, 2007 – 4:23 pm

This article is part of a series on films at DIFF 2007.

Well, the time has come to separate the best from the rest. For me, the festival peaked with the world premiere of “Captain Abu Raed” – the first Jordanian feature film in a rather long number of years.

Let me tell you, all those decades upon decades were certainly worth the wait.

Director, writer, and producer Amin Matalqa described this film as a “fable,” which is probably as close as one can get to its essence without giving too much away. The hero of the story, portrayed by veteran Nadim Sawalha (you’ve seen him everywhere from “Syriana” to “The Nativity Story” as of late), is a janitor who gets mistaken for an airline pilot on account of a hat fished out of the trash in Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport.

Abu Raed is an older man who leads a quiet life, having conversations with his dead wife’s portrait and spending his evenings with only a cup of tea for company. This is a man who had dreams once; you can still see something of them in his kind, keen gaze, alongside past calamities and defeats, all equally ground down by the thievish passage of time.

It is the exicted attention of his humble neighborhood’s children that inspires Abu Raed to assume the role of storyteller and sage; as he recounts tales of the fictional adventures of the man he might have been, we discover that the man he is is not a whole lot different. Abu Raed can still be a hero, janitor’s uniform and all.

Thanks to the editing of obscenely young Laith Majali (who is also one of the producers) and the brilliant cinematography of Reinhart Peschke, the movie has a lush, gorgeous look: the light alternates between laving like honey and casting inky shadows on faces and streets. The city of Amman exists as a separate character here, a living landscape transversed with human lives.

This is a family-friendly (I hate that horrible adjective, but there it is) film that nevertheless deals with the darker side of life. Read More »

By Natalia Antonova | Posted in arts and literature, dubai, entertainment, jordan | Comments (8)

Notes from the Dubai International Film Festival: The Battle for Haditha

December 13, 2007 – 7:41 am

This article is part of a series on various films at DIFF 2007.

Nick Broomfield’s “The Battle for Haditha” has not yet gotten enough press. In some ways, this is understandable. Despite the explosive subject matter, this is a low-key film. There are no big-name actors, no enormous budget, and, most importantly, the picture’s stylistic elements tend toward a stark, bare-boned simplicity. Nevertheless, this is a film to see.

Broomfield cast many amateurs for key roles, among them some ex-Marines and Iraqi refugees, and this is both good and bad. There is a definite air of authenticity surrounding the film, yet the acting occasionally appears forced. Some of the dialogue struck me as contrived- although this may have something to do with the subtitles. I do not speak Arabic, but having been accompanied by an Arabic speaker at the screening, I discovered that the subtitles are not as good as they could have been.

This movie is earnest, but, in some scenes, it also comes across as didactic. Do we really need to see the chief insurgent character, a disgruntled former member of the Iraqi army, spelling out the message with lines such as: “The Americans created the insurgency by dis-banding the army”? Does the chief insurgent furthermore have to opine stiffly on the future of Iraq, noting (in a manner that suggests that he is channeling Fukuyama) the bleak possibility of the country inheriting a new leader, someone who will be a helluva lot worse than Saddam?

Yet in spite of a few missteps, this is a haunting picture. I can’t get it out of my head, and I probably won’t for a long time. Broomfield captures the comings and goings of the residents of Haditha, people whose lives are about to be shattered, with intimacy and grace. I was floored by the character of Rashied (Duraid A. Ghaieb), a young man besotted with his pregnant wife (Yasmine Hanani – who attended the screening alongside the director, and ex-Marine actors Elliot Ruiz and Eric Mehalacopoulos), keenly aware of the growing danger of staying with his family in Haditha, and yet unable to do much about it.

Alongside U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians, Broomfield dares to portray the members of the Iraqi insurgency as human beings. These people are not just fundamentalist foreigners, they are also ordinary locals who are infuriated with what has happened to their country. This simple truth is about as inconvenient as anything Al Gore can come up with, and is bound to make American audiences squirm in their seats. Read More »

By Natalia Antonova | Posted in arts and literature, dubai, entertainment, iraq, terrorism | Comments (3)

The English Patient’s Fourth Hand

February 18, 2004 – 4:30 am

John Irving’s latest book “The Fourth Hand” is crap and he knows it! Irving must have realized that at some stage during the writing process because suddenly his two leading characters start exchanging accolades about another novel. It is as though Irving is saying “Damn it, if only this novel could be half as well written as that other book.” Read More »

By Nasser Ali Khasawneh | Posted in arts and literature | Comments (0)