In May, AFLAMUNA.online presents four feature films from Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia and Palestine, alongside two short films from Lebanon and Palestine.
Cursed Be the Phosphate
In 2008, residents of Redeyef, a Tunisian city heavily reliant on phosphate production, rose against state corruption and the dire, unhealthy, and perilous conditions of their existence. This revolt marked the first significant protest movement against Ben Ali's oppressive regime and its police state despite facing brutality and tyranny in response. While not a complete success, it ignited a spark of resistance among the Tunisian people, awakening them to the deteriorating levels of freedom. This uprising paved the way for the 2011 revolution and the Arab Spring.
Dream Fragments
A rich land economically and culturally, Algeria fluctuates today between despair and the hope of a new beginning. Then there is a series of suicides at the heart of society. The coast and the sea. Images flow into and over each other poetically like a Fata Morgana.
The Roof
It is a poetic film that describes the journey of a man about to return to his family and country of origin.
Despite the long-standing and distinctive political background, the message is universal, thanks to how the director examines the social context of his story through the lyrical representation of the human capacity to imagine and create worlds that pass through time and space. During the film, it turns out that home is not just a place but also a feeling. Even if it is destroyed by bombs, the inhabitants will take it with them wherever they go, unable to leave behind something integral to their self-concept.
untitled part 1: everything and nothing
An intimate dialogue that weaves back and forth between representations of a figure (of resistance) and subject with, *Soha Bechara ex-Lebanese National Resistance fighter in her Paris dorm room taped (during the last year of the Israeli occupation) one year after her release from captivity in El-Khiam torture and interrogation centre (S. Lebanon) where she had been detained for 10 years, 6 years in isolation. Revising notions of resistance, survival and will, recounting to death, separation and closeness; the overexposed image and body of a surviving martyr speaking quietly and directly into the camera juxtaposed against her self and image, not speaking of the torture but of the distance between the subject and the loss, of what is left behind and what remains.
Black Mouse
Between 1962 and 1975, Oscar Niemeyer was commissioned to design the Tripoli International Fair. As the structure was on the verge of completion, the events of the 1970s transfigured the structure into something gargantuan, incomplete, and abandoned - a white elephant. A biker's trip through Tripoli becomes the backdrop through which we explore these events from the standpoint of the city's residents. Along his journey, the fair catches his eye. He approaches its gates only to enter a state of delirium and be taken on a sonic journey along the Orient Express. Oscar Niemeyer takes a drag of his cigarette and waxes poetic. Somewhere along this stream of consciousness, he reflects on the relationship between structures and the society surrounding them, eventually commenting on what has become of the thing he built.
Letter to Obama
In a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, two boys decide to send a message to U.S.A. President Barack Obama through his Facebook page. They ask him to intervene and end the siege on the Gaza Strip, and they invite him and his wife to visit the Strip and witness people’s hardships there. But they never receive a response. They decided to use a small video camera to record a very angry video message addressed to Barack Obama from the people of the camp.