NY Arab & South Asian Film Festival: www.nyasaff.org

Alwan for the Arts, 3rd i NY, and the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective are once again joining forces to bring New York audiences the best in recent features, docs, & shorts from North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and their diasporas at prestigious venues such as Tribeca Cinemas, Columbia University, Art in General, Two Boots Pioneer theater and NYU.

Scheduled for March 5 - 16, 2008, the New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival (NYASAFF) strives to bring you films and videos that achieve the highest artistic quality as well as provide a much-needed counterpoint to the stereotypical representations often encountered in mainstream media.

Although our organizations came together as a result of the geopolitical realities of the contemporary post 9-11 world, over time, we have also discovered the need to reflect on the complex and intertwined histories of these regions and the ways in which our art, music, philosophy, and literature have enriched and inflected each other over millennia.

As we finalize the 2008 NYASAFF program, we are happy to announce several highlights and themes that should delight and challenge viewers. The 2008 fest rolls out a slew of US and NY Premiere features that range from politically astute comedies to gritty, yet poignant examinations of urban poverty. An emerging theme amongst this roster of films is the multi-faceted nature of sexual desire in the Arab & South Asian world, stories of love and attraction marked by racial and class tension, war, religious restrictions, and the hardships of migration. Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, will guest curate a program on Belly-Dancing in Egyptian Cinema.

Tribeca alternative arts space, Art in General, will play host to an evening of Video Art Programs, that will be guest curated by Özkan Cangüven a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Ozkan has put together a selection of Turkish videos exploring issues that are transforming the country as it prepares to enter the European Union. In addition, Swati Khurana, a member of South Asian Women’s Creative Collective and media artist, will curate a program of experimental Arab & South Asian shorts that will examine the subject of storytelling and its complicated connection to the real.

HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:

US & NY Premieres

AmericanEast tells a real story of Arabs living in the US from their perspective. Featuring Emmy Award-winning actor Tony Shalhoub and Kais Nashif (of Paradise Now fame), the film demonstrates, with both humor and raw emotion, how friendships are tested amongst diverse patrons of a Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles when the owner decides to partner with a Jewish businessman.

Cut & Paste is the latest romantic comedy by Egyptian female director Hala Khalil, starring Hanan Turk and Sherif Mounir as two young Egyptians who plot a bogus marriage in order to emigrate to New Zealand. Khalil exploits the hilarity of a marriage of convenience that unexpectedly turns into something more.

Night Shadows by Algerian director Nasser Bakhti takes us beneath the privileged exterior of Geneva, Switzerland where we meet five multi- racial and cultural characters, and monitor their deeply desperate lives over 24 hours.

Rising Tunisian director Jilani Saadi also takes viewers into the grittier side of urban life with Tender is the Wolf, in which a gentle young man and his group of outcast friends must pay the price when they rape a prostitute.

In the Name of God (Khuda Ke Liye), the Pakistani 170 minute debut epic which won its director Shoaib Mansoor the Silver Pyramid award at the 2007 Cairo International Film Festival is about a young man’s musical career that is turned upside in the intersection of politics and religion in post 9/11 Pakistan. With all the Bollywood elements of musical stars (Naseeruddin Shah); love and romance; politics, religion and intrigue, In the Name of God is a riveting complex plot that switches from Lahore to London, from Waziristan to Chicago with urgent pace dissecting relationship and sentiments, without losing grip on its multilayered narrative.

Penny Woolcock directs one of the most refreshing, funny, yet hard-hitting films to come from the UK in years with Mischief Night. Set in the council estates of Leeds during Mischief Night, the Yorkshire version of Halloween, children’s pranks unwittingly break the barriers between two families, one white and one Pakistani, in a blaze of crime, clubbing, love and fireworks – changing all their lives forever.

Morshedul Islam’s Doll House is a story of anguish and love set against the backdrop of war. Rehana, a headstrong young woman, arrives in a village along with other refugees during the turmoil of liberation in Bangladesh, 1971. There she meets and comes to love Yakub who is torn between protecting her and joining the fight.

Belly-Dancing in Egyptian Cinema

Hassan Al Imam’s Take Care of Zuzu (Khali balak min zuzu) is an Egytian classic Hussein Fahmy and Soad Hosny in which Zuzu is a student who has paid her way through college by bellydancing in her mother’s troupe. She has kept this fact a secret, but has decided to give up dancing because she has fallen in love with a college professor. His ex-fiancee discovers Zuzu’s secret and tries to sabotage her.

Niazi Mostafa’s A Glass and a Cigarette (Sigara we Kass) is a captivating classic from the golden age of Egyptian cinema featuring Samia Gamal as Hoda, a famous dancer who gives up the spotlight to marry Mamdouh, a handsome young doctor. When Mamdouh’s scheming head nurse Yolanda (played by the radiant Dalida) sets her sights on Mamdouh, Hoda’s jealousy drives her to drink, ultimately endangering everything she holds dear.

Hassan Al Imam’s Shafiqa the Copt is based on the real story of a legendary bellydancer born to conservative Coptic parents whose early death left her poor. She rose to fame by dancing in the “El Dorado” nightclub, where she was the first to do the candelabra dance before owning her own club. She eventually succumbed to addiction and died in 1926. Featuring Hind Rostom, Hassan Youssef, and Zizi El Badrawi.

Shore of Love (Châti’ el gharâm) follows Adel, a rich young bachelor content with his affair with a dancer, Soheir, who steadfastly refuses his aunt’s urging to marry her daughter. However, his life changes when he falls in love with and marries Laila, a beautiful but penniless woman with a lovely singing voice. family aren’t willing to give up easily. Starring the legendary bellydancer Tahia Carioca.

Video Art Programs

“The Country, not the Bird” curated by Özkan Cangüven

Özkan Cangüven is a independent curator, originally from Turkey who is currently living and working in New York. Graduated from Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies last summer where he curated his thesis show “We Love Cinema” with artists appropriating cinema in their works. Cangüven previously worked at New Museum of Contemporary Art and at Scenic as curatorial assistant to curators Simon Watson and Craig Hansela. He has currently curated a film screening with Shirin Neshat and Matthew Barney for the Istanbul Film Festival and working on other curatorial projects.

“This screening consists of a selection of videos that impressed me as a curator and as an avid video art fan. With their aesthetic creativity and technical execution, they are among the most impressive of the last couple of years. “

Osman Bozkurt’s documentary video “auto-park” reflects the urban struggle of an every growing city where people create their own ways of leisure in places they are not supposed to be.

Köken Ergün’s “I, Soldier” is a voyeuristic look at to a nationalistic ceremony where the “sacred” identity of being a soldier has been reaffirmed and celebrated.

Sefer Memisoglu “Untitled” has a nonlinear narration, presenting a brief, psychological story rife with ambiguous readings and interpretations.

Ahmet Ögut’s “Cut it out” a fictional re-creation of a familiar reality of our times, in a disturbing but ironic approach.

Fahrettin Örenli’s video “Shadows of Dust(Episode III.)” overlays a segment of a traditional shadow puppet show with a current speech about money, connecting the past to the present.

“The Stories We Tell” curated by Swati Khurana
Swati Khurana is an Indian-born, Brooklyn-based artist, whose work has been shown internationally. She has received several awards and residencies, recently through the Jerome Foundation, Rotunda Gallery/BCAT, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Kartong Village Development Committee (The Gambia, West Africa). Swati has been a founding member of, and now currenly serves as a Board Member of, the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective.

This video program will feature short, experimental works by South Asian and Arab artists whose work reveals the tenuous nature of story-telling. The videos will be a combination of home movies as necessary fictions, excavations of propaganda and other effective formats of lie-spreading, documentary efforts at revealing the
‘real’, the stories that performances and performativity can tell, and narrative films where the act of telling the story becomes the narrative.

Titles include:
“Coconut Oil” Rina Banerjee, 2004, RT 5:00
“When scenes travel …bubble, bubble” Rina Banerjee, 2004, RT: 4:52
“Residence” Andrew Demirjian, 2004, RT: 2:00;
“Desiring” Dahlia Elsayed, 2007, RT 1:06;
“The Birthday of a Hunter” Hamid Ghavami, 2000, RT: 5:00;
“No body has a name Nobody” Hosein Gourchian, 5:00, 2006;
“Natasha” Sarita Khurana, 2007, RT 10:00;
“I Can’t Get Enough of You” Carol Pereira, 2007, RT: 4:06;
“A Short Film about Graffiti” Sai Sriskandarajah, 2007, RT 3:15

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