/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/FILM-SYRIA: Foreign Offerings Scoop Top Awards

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

George Baghdadi

DAMASCUS, Nov 13 2001 (IPS) - The movie “Aberdeen”, by Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland, has won the 2001 Damascus Film Festival top award.

The second prize has been awarded to the “Two Moons and an Olive Branch”, a Syrian film by the star director Abdel Latif Abdel Hamid.

The third prize has been shared between “Everybody’s Famous”, directed by Belgian Dominique Deruddere and “Bread and Tulips” by Italian Silvio Soldini.

Italian Licia Maglietta won the prize for best actress, while Belgian Josse de Pauw walked away with the prize for best actor.

Peter Patzak, Austria’s celebrated director, headed the 10- member jury at the festival.

The Damascus Film Festival is held every two years. The last one, organised in 1999, was criticised for poor quality of films, organisational sluggishness, and the general decline in state- produced films in Syria.

Mohammed al-Ahmad, the new head of the National Film Organisation (NFO), which is responsible for importing films, producing them, and organising the festival, says all three fronts benefited from the much-needed rejuvenation.

In Sep 2000, Ahmad succeeded Marwan Haddad who was criticised for the decline of the festival.

Haddad says, over the past two decades, the NFO’s average annual cinema production hovered around one film. “In the last three years, there wasn’t a single Syrian film produced,” he says.

When Ahmad took over he ordered production to begin on two projects whose scripts were ready and awaiting approval. The two films, by Abdullatif Abdulhamid and Ghassan Shmeit, were Syria’s entries in the 2001 feature film competition.

Ahmad says Morocco’s and Tunisia’s strategy of resorting to joint production could be a model for Syria to get the highest number of films produced under budgetary constraints.

Proudly thumbing through the weighty, nearly 300-page catalogue for the 12th Damascus Film Festival, Hassan Sami Youssef almost looks at it in disbelief. Viewers used to the previous festivals, he says, were “astonished” by what was being offered.

Youssef, a novelist and screenwriter by trade, calls the eight- day festival, which ended last week, an “unprecedented” achievement in terms of the films being offered.

Also on the sidelines were more than half a dozen panoramas by Austrian, Italian, Egyptian and Syrian directors.

The panoramas included big-name films — Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chocolate, American Beauty, Gladiator, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? — that viewers had no opportunity to watch on screen in Syria.

Since the United States began bombing Afghanistan, a chorus of anti-American rhetoric has filled the streets of the Muslim world from Indonesia to Pakistan to the Middle East. But cinema is, maybe, the only place where many Muslims still warmly embrace what America has to offer — the local cinema.

Whether it is the epic tale of a doomed ocean liner in “Titanic”, the fancy swordplay of Antonio Banderas in “The Mask of Zorro”, or Julia Roberts’ toothy smile in “My Best Friend’s Wedding”, American movies continue to entertain audiences in Syria, Lebanon, Malaysia and the rest of Islamic world.

Young, middle-class Syrians at the six-story Cham Palace Hotel in downtown Damascus, where an American movie has been showing, say that no matter how much Arabs may criticise the U.S. bombing, they love American movies.

“I don’t see a connection between the attacks and my attitude toward American movies,” says Hanan Olabi, 19, a recent high school graduate. “The attack is a reality. Movies are entertainment, and it’s only a movie.”

Her friend, 16-year-old Muneera Hasan, says, “I only watch American movies because they’re the best. I love the United States. It’s a civilised country and I love travelling there. Every time I watch an American movie, it reminds me of the good times I spent in America,” she says.

The Muslim world remains divided over Western cultural influence. In countries with a more cosmopolitan tradition, like Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey, Hollywood movies are more popular than in more conservative Islamic states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In the Pakistani desert city of Quetta, mobs encouraged by Muslim clerics – chanting “Death to America” to protest the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan – set fire to three movie theatres, including one showing “Desperado” starring Banderas.