DUBAI: “There’s a growing demand for Arab cinema from UK audiences,” Amani Hassan, program director at the Arab British Center in London, which organizes the SAFAR Film Festival, tells Arab News.
This is a landmark year for the festival, which runs from July 1-17. As well as being the 10th anniversary of its debut, it marks SAFAR’s transition to an annual event and sees it expand to venues in Wales and Scotland, as well as England. Ten cinemas across the UK will be screening the festival’s 22 titles between July 1 and July 17.
As the only festival in the UK dedicated to promoting films from across the Arab world, SAFAR plays an important role not only in the cultural exchange to which the Arab British Center is dedicated, but in the development of Arab cinema. As Hassan points out, “We’re showing some films that haven’t been shown in their home countries.”
Darin J. Sallam’s acclaimed “Farha” is getting its UK premiere at SAFAR. (Supplied)
This year’s theme is “The Stories We Tell,” with a program curated by Rabih El-Khoury, exploring, he said in the press release, “the devices used by Arab filmmakers to push cinematic boundaries, reclaim overlooked histories, and present new perspectives to audiences both at home and abroad – importantly, on our own terms.
Among the 22 films showing at Safar is “Becoming” — an omnibus film consisting of five stories, each by a different female Saudi filmmaker. Hassan tells Arab News that she pushed to have it included in SAFAR this year: “I saw it at the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah, and I thought it was pretty amazing to be sitting and watching a film made by five Saudi females in Saudi.”
A still from “Heliopolis,” the festival’s opening film. (Supplied)
She stresses, however, that the film is in the program on merit — not for some form of tokenism. “It wouldn’t have been included if we didn’t think it was a good film,” she says.
“Becoming” joins four other films getting their UK premiere at SAFAR: Darin J. Sallam’s acclaimed “Farha”; Omar El-Zohairy’s “Feathers,” which won the Grand Prize at Cannes International Critics Week; Eliane Raheb’s “Miguel’s War”; and Leila Bouzid’s “A Tale of Love and Desire.”
All five films are prime examples of the “new perspectives” El-Khoury is looking for, and of the ever-increasing quality of Arab filmmaking — something Hassan has noted in the six years that she has been involved with SAFAR.
“They are telling stories about topics that perhaps wouldn’t have been possible five or 10 years ago,” she says. “That’s what I find really interesting.”
