Throughout the film festival, we’ve been bringing you bitesize, behind-the-scenes, blogs to read. Written by Ja’far ‘Abd al-Hamid, a writer-director, with a focus on Arab British stories. His latest feature film, Kal & Cambridge, is scheduled for release next year.
SAFAR Film Festival ran from 29 June to 9 July 2023, across 9 cities in the UK.
SAFAR 2023 Last Weekend Screenings: Beirut the Encounter, Notes on Displacement and Foragers
From the moment on Saturday I turn into the building block housing cinemas one and two at the Barbican, I feel conflicted. The festive sense of being at my favourite UK film festival is tinged with an awareness of the fast approaching end of this year’s edition.
Borhane Alaouié’s Beirut the Encounter (1981) is an ode to love, to Beirut, to the victims of the civil war in Lebanon that lasted from 1975 to 1990.
In retrospect, it touches me as a prescient requiem for an entire generation of Lebanese and Arabs’ post-colonial dreams of a prosperous and happy life for the whole region.
Two college lovers, Zeina, a Christian in East Beirut, and Haydar, a Muslim Shi‘ah in the West of the divided capital, arrange to meet years after university, during the civil war.
They keep missing one another.
They come to a compromise; they use cassette tape recorders to intimate all that they wish to say to one another. All the thoughts, feelings, yearnings, that have built up over the years for each other; all on an audio tape.
The cassette recorder’s small mic picks the background symphony of the city – the cars, the music, the call for prayer, kids playing nearby. Perhaps it recreates the scene of the act of recording in the mind of the expected audience of one on the other side of the city.
“Frustrating,” is the review of the film I hear from one of the three young European women chatting by the main entrance.
Without wishing to give the plot away, like the romantic in me, she wishes if a particular event had come to pass in the story.
Needless to say, the said event is withheld by design; it is at the heart of the beauty of the film.
The festival’s penultimate screening on Sunday is Notes on Displacement (2023), directed by Khaled Jarrar.
In the Q&A over Zoom, the Palestinian director recounts how sitting in a coffee shop in Ramallah, he received an audio message from a Palestinian family. “Mr Jarrar, please help us; we are drowning!”
At some level, this short snippet in the Q&A conveys the harrowing and unfathomable trauma that refugees from the war in Syria have had to endure in order to reach the relative safety of a Greek island.
The pain is compounded for Nadira, an elderly Palestinian refugee in Syria. She has been a refugee from the age of 12, since 1948 and the creation of the State of Israel.
At this advanced age, she has been forced to leave Syria to seek refuge once again.
Before the closing night film, at the cinema café I find Mohanad Yaqubi, the director of R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity (2022), which had screened at the same venue on Friday, the 7th of July.
I say hello.
On hearing that he teaches and lives in Belgium, I ask if he is personally acquainted with the great Palestinian auteur Michel Khleifi, whose work includes the seminal Urs al-Jalil (Wedding in Galilee) (1987). I recall Khleifi resides in Belgium
“Of course; we meet regularly, though we live in different cities.”
I share with him a happy anecdote related to Khleifi that happened to me back when I was an undergrad in London.
I bid him a safe journey back, as Becky Harrison, Programme Manager at the Arab British Centre, confirms, “four minutes!”. His Uber is en route.
This festival edition’s last screening is Foragers (Dir. Jumana Manna, Palestine 2022).
The seemingly everyday occurrence of Palestinian women and men foraging for Wild Oregano (an ingredient of the Palestinian herbal mix Za‘atar) as well as ‘Akkoub (an edible thistle-like plant), is obstructed by the full force of the Israeli legal system, on the basis that both are “protected species”.
Director Jumana Manna skilfully blends documentary footage with scripted, as well as loosely outlined reenactments, of the interaction between mostly elderly Palestinian individuals with the “Green Patrol”, and the Israeli judiciary.
The resilience, stoicism and also the humour in Foragers reminds me of the work of Emir Kusturica, Cristi Puiu, and of course Manna’s Palestinian compatriot Elia Suleiman.
I can’t wait to see more of her work.
At the screening, Amani Hassan, Programme Director at the Arab British Centre, thanks the sponsors, supporters, the audience, and the SAFAR team, including her “pillar” Becky Harrison, Programme Manager. She says shukran to Rabih El Khoury, SAFAR curator, for his sublime work.
Waiting for my train at Barbican station, I recall the films and stories in which I have been immersed at SAFAR screenings. I think of the awe-inspiring filmmakers at this year’s edition; at times, effectively risking their livelihoods, prosecution and more, in order to share their stories with the world.
As the Circle Line train pulls in at the platform, I can’t help but glance back at the stairs up to the street and to the Barbican Centre nearby.
I smile, “a year will go by in a blink.”
Until SAFAR 2024.