2015 Toronto Film Festival heralds a new golden age of Arab cinema

Festival programmer Rasha Salti was bowled over by the quality of films from the region that were submitted this year.

3,000 Nights focuses on a Palestinian prisoner in an Israeli jail who becomes pregnant just as the other inmates are about to revolt. Courtesy Tiff
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The traditional gift for a 40th anniversary is a ruby, but gold might be more appropriate for the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, the 40th edition, which runs from September 10 to 20.

Tiff, which began in 1976 with 127 films from 30 countries, this year boasts 399 from 71, including the world premières of potential Oscar contenders including Demolition (starring Jake Gyllenhaal), The Martian (with Matt Damon) and The Program (starring Ben Foster as cyclist Lance Armstrong). Last year's best actor and actress Oscar winners Eddie Redmayne and Julianne Moore will also be in town.

But while the 40th edition of the festival will feature lots of glitz and glitter, the 13 films from the Middle East and Africa might shine the brightest.

“I think we could be witnessing a new golden age in Arab cinema,” says programmer Rasha Salti. “I’ve been doing this for more than 10 years. I’ve seen a lot of films and I sit on several commissions to read scripts. It’s not easy for somebody like me to be completely surprised, and I was. A few films floored me.”

Salti’s résumé is varied, indeed. She co-curated the Sharjah Biennial in 2010 and worked with the defunct Abu Dhabi Film Festival in 2009 and 2010.

So when she mentions a golden age, she knows of what she speaks. To her, the original golden age was the period between 1965-1975, after Nasser's revolution helped the arts flourish in the region, leading to films such as Tewfik Saleh's The Dupes (1972), which was set in Iraq, produced by Syria and based on Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani's novella, and Shadi Abdel Salam's Egyptian classic Al-mummia (1969).

Salti believes Tiff’s 2015 films display the same kind of artistic value.

Much Loved, for example, tells the story of four working women and shows a side of Marrakech many tourists miss.

“This was not a film cooked up in a fancy apartment in Paris,” Salti says. “It deals with taboo subject matter in an uncompromising manner.”

Another female-centric film that surprised Salti was 3,000 Nights, the first narrative feature from career documentarian Mai Maari. The story focuses on a Palestinian prisoner in an Israeli jail who becomes pregnant just as the other inmates are about to revolt.

“I thought it would be claustrophobic and everything would be grey,” Salti says. “I loved that it’s not.”

It is not only the subject matter of this year's films that has surprised Salti, but the form of some of them. Moroccan director Hicham Lasri and his crew worked through the final 10 days of Ramadan to shoot the film Starve Your Dog, about a former minister of the interior who confesses to torture and kidnapping on live television so he can regain his position as a cultural personality.

“The form is really interesting,” Salti says. It’s non-linear: not experimental, but definitely unusual.”

The music is the transgressive element in As I Open My Eyes, Leyla Bouzid's debut feature, which tells the story of a young rock singer on the eve of Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution. The production hired a spoken-word artist to write the lyrics to complement the music by Khyam Allami, an Iraqi who lived in Tunisia.

“One of the teenage reviewers we had in as part of our New Wave programme to nurture a new generation of cinemagoers said of this film: ‘Alternative Tunisian rock is dope’,” says Salti.

Even the genres covered by the region’s filmmakers are undergoing a shift. Among more than 60 submissions to Tiff this year, two were horror films. A Turkish film will even play in Midnight Madness, a programme reserved for edgier, more adult films.

“I think the Arab world needed two things: to be less self-inhibited and to increase its professionalisation,” Salti says. “In the end, this is one of the benefits of Tiff. It’s not only one Arab film. There are a good six or seven and they come here, talk to real people, and begin to find within them the desire to make different kinds of films, not to repeat themselves. I don’t invite films that resemble each other.”

One of the genre-busters this year is Very Big Shot, a film about three Lebanese brothers who, when forced to commit a crime, find an ingenious solution that's part Argo, part Traffic. The debut feature from Beirut's Mir-Jean Bou Chayya is described in the programme guide as "comic", but the director is not sure that's the right way to describe it.

"The film is not a comedy," he says. "The Doha Film Institute [which helped with funding] classified it as an 'innovative genre film' – and I like that label better than comedy." In fact, Salti says she screamed while watching Very Big Shot, so perhaps thriller is the right word.

artslife@thenational.ae