Banipal Magazine Issue 62

We are delighted to partner with Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature on the fourth edition of SAFAR: A Literary Journey Through Arab Cinema.

BANIPAL 62 is a special collaboration with SAFAR, celebrating the connections between literature and film and providing wider insight and context into the SAFAR programme.

The 66-page feature includes introductions to the festival by Nadia El-Sebai, director of the Arab British Centre, and its curator Joseph Fahim, along with articles, interviews, images and reviews, exploring and discussing the adaptation of literature into film. The pairs of books and films from the SAFAR programme include Horses of God by Mahi Binebine; Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani with its film version The Dupes; Mouloud Mammeri’s Opium and the Baton; and Brazilian author Jorge Amado’s The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell and its Egyptian film Fallen Angels Paradise. Award-winning film-maker and photographer Koutaiba al-Janabi talks about his documentary Stories of Passers Through – receiving a European premiere at the Festival – and there is an important call by Haitham El-Zobaidi for more Arab women writers to have film adaptations.

Other notable literary adaptations explored in the Issue include Tayeb Salih’s The Wedding of Zein, Youssef Chahine’s The Sixth Day, as well as For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri, and Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun. Daoud Abdel Sayed, director of the famous Egyptian film Kit Kat that is adapted from Ibrahim Aslan’s novel The Heron, is interviewed by Mansoura Ez-Eldin, and for fiction lovers there is a short story, The Broken Streetlight, by Tunisian pioneer of the short story Ali Douagi, one of the stories in the film In the Land of Tararanni.

Banipal 62 is available as a single print issue or as part of a digital or a print subscription.  To find out more about Banipal and buy a copy or subscribe, head to their website www.banipal.co.uk.