Arab Cinema Center Reveals Winners of 4th Critics Awards For Arab Films
Within the Virtual Cannes Marché du Film
Through a virtual ceremony through Zoom platform, the Arab Cinema Center (ACC) revealed the winners of the fourth edition of its Critics Awards for Arab Films during the Virtual Marché du Film. The award is submitted based on the voting of a jury of 141 members from across 57 countries. The critics have viewed Arab feature and documentary films produced in 2019 on Festival Scope.
To watch the award ceremony check the following link: https://youtu.be/qz1m0KElw5I
For the first time in the history of Arab cinema, the jury committee brings together 141 of the most prominent Arab and international film critics from 57 countries from all over the world this year.
Furthermore, the Arab Cinema Center announced that American film critic Deborah Young is the newly assigned Manager of the Critics’ Awards for Arab Films.
The list of award winners and where to watch them:
Best Documentary:
Talking About Trees (BFI Player and Amazon) | Directed by Suhaib Gasmelbari | Sudan
Four idealistic and intensely humane filmmakers who have been lifetime friends reunite after long years of distance and exile. Their love of cinema is deeply embedded in them and allows them to function in a near dysfunctional Sudan as they seek to rebuild their dreams of cinema which were formed in the 1960s.
Winner of 11 awards out of 11 nominations.
In the 1960s, when an idealist fervor for independence and cinema thrived throughout the “third world”, Ibrahim Shaddad, Suliman Ibrahim, Eltayeb Mahdi and Manar Al-Hilofour went to film schools abroad with idea of creating a new Sudanese cinema. Politics quashed their plans but they remained true to their dream. The 1989 Coup d’Etat and the continuously deteriorating economy, the political leadership with its Islamic fundamentalism suppressed cinema because it was the most important channel of freedom of expression.
Returning to Khartoum from their exiles, and in order to resuscitate their old dream of making cinema a reality in Sudan, they try to renovate an old outdoor movie venue.
Filmmaker Suhail Gasmelbari follows their unerring but frequently blocked path as they seek to leave a trace of their passage and revive an everlasting passion for film.
The issue of the Sudanese cinema industry and its history remains a matter of concern to filmmaker Suhail Gasmelbari, originally an audio-visual archive researcher who, in 2017, made Sudan’s Forgotten Films, a short TV doc about Sudanese cinema.
It is notable that a few months after the film was made the Sudanese revolution against the dictator Al-Bashir took place and today Sudan is having mass protests to make the new bipartisan government act responsibly to achieve the goals of the revolution.
(ISA) International Sales Agent: Wide
Sudan, France, Germany, Chad | 2019 | 93 min Arabic, English, Russian, with English Subtitles.
Best Film:
It Must Be Heaven (OSN)| Director: Elia Suleiman | Palestine
It Must Be Heaven, sweetly surreal, as whimsical as a Jacques Tati film, and with a hilarious cameo with Gael Garcia Bernal introducing Suleiman to his agent, wryly observes our human race.
ES escapes from Palestine, putting away his parents’ effects, and sets out to seek an alternative homeland only to find that the absolute absurdities of his home in Palestine are equal to those in “the west”. Palestine trails behind him and the promise of a new life turns into a comedy of drole misteps taking him from Paris to New York and back to what must be heaven.
This comic saga explores identity, nationality and belonging, in which Suleiman asks the fundamental question: where is the place we can truly call home?
It Must Be Heaven is an international coproduction of Palestine, France, Qatar, Germany, Canada, Turkey. It was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival where it received the FIPRESCI Prize and Special Mention of the Jury. It is the Palestinian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards.
ISA: Wild Bunch
Best Actress:
Hend Sabry (Netflix)| Noura’s Dream | Tunisia
Noura, played by Tunisian actress Hind Sabri, is a woman who shoulders the responsibility for her three children and a tough minimum-wage job where pilfering by her coworkers is an issue threatening the jobs of everyone. Her husband Sofiane is in jail. Bringing a shred of light into her exhausting existence is her lover Lassaad. However, Noura has to navigate the hazards of adultery in Tunisia — punishable by five years in jail. Just as her divorce is about to come through, Noura’s husband is unexpectedly released from jail, throwing all her well-laid plans to the wind.
Caught in the middle of the two men, Noura, a woman under siege in her world, finds that making difficult personal choices is a dangerous endeavor, but she never loses sight of her goals. While the man-created chaos rages around her, she keeps an enigmatic calmness which belies the depth of her actively dreaming. She is, in fact, living on a plane separate from the dramas that make up her life though such activity is completely invisible to our eyes.
Hend Sabry, who deservedly won for Best Actress, sometimes looks like Julia Roberts especially while flashing her bright smile in happy moments, but she is just as able to show serious, impatient fury as she finally lashes out at her husband signaling she has had enough of his lies.
Hend Sabry is a Cairo-based Tunisian actress and lawyer. She was born in Tunis on 20th November and received her license in law at the Faculty of Law of Tunis in 2001. Later she completed her masters in law intellectual property and copyright in 2004. Her acting debut was at the age of fourteen in the Tunisian production “Les Silences du Palais” (Silence of Palaces) in 1994. After starring a number of Tunisian productions, Hend’s breakthrough was through “Muzakirat Murahiqua” (A Teenager’s Diary) that was considered the most controversial film in 2002. Her role gave her immediate stardom across the Arab world and in a short span of time she became one of the most prominent Tunisian actresses in Egypt and the Arab world. Sabry is prominently involved in social and humanitarian work; since 2009, she has been working closely with the UN World Food Programme on raising awareness about hunger in the region. In 2010, Sabry had officially become a WFP Regional Ambassador. She is also one of four women who have contributed in the Facebook campaign inspired by the Arab spring titled “The Uprising of Women in the Arab World” which promotes gender equality in accordance with the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and calls to grant freedom, independence and security for Arab women.”
This is the first fiction feature Hinde Boujemaa has directed. A Tunisian-Belgian woman who holds a degree in marketing from the Institut Économique de Bruxelles , she worked in makeup and special effects, and brought up children before starting her career in filmmaking. In 2006 she studied scriptwriting in a French correspondence course school, Educatel-Paris, after which she worked as a screenwriter for several Tunisian feature films. In 2009 she wrote a feature film script, Under Paradise, which won the Sud Ecriture prize at the Carthage Film Festival. She has said that the Tunisian Revolution in 2011 was responsible for her own “personal revolution”, giving her the inspiration to pursue filmmaking for herself.
ISA: Wild Bunch
Best Actor:
Sami Bouajila | A Son | Tunisia
Eleven year old Aziz needs a liver transplant after being seriously injured during a terrorist ambush while on holiday in 2011. At the hospital a family secret will be revealed.
Sami Bouajila was born on May 26, 1966 in La Tronche, Isère, France. He is an actor and director, known for The Siege (1998), The Adventures of Felix (2000) and Days of Glory (2006).
ISA: The Party Film Sales
Best Screenplay:
Amjad Abu Alala, Yousef Ibrahim | You Will Die At Twenty (Netflix)| Sudan
Shortly after Muzamil was born, the village’s holy man predicts that he will die at age 20. Muzamil’s father can’t stand the curse and leaves home. Sakina raises her son as a single mother, overly protective. One day, Muzamil turns 19.
Winner of El Gouna Golden Star for Narrative Film (Trophy, certificate, and US$50,000).
Very few films come out of Sudan, so it is revealing to see two here winning the Arab Critics Award: You Will Die at 20, the debut film made by the young Amjad Abu Alala, and Talking About Trees.
Amjad Abu Alala is a Sudanese filmmaker and screenwriter who was born and raised in the UAE, where he studied media at the United Arab Emirates University. As a producer and director, he wrote and directed numerous short films that participated in various festivals, including Coffee and Orange (2004), Feathers of the Birds (2005), and Teena (2009). His film Studio (2012) was supervised by Abbas Kiarostami at a workshop Kiarostami himself was conducting. Alala also won the Best Arabic Theatre Script Award from the Arab Authority for Apple Pies (2013). He is currently Head of the Programming Committee at the Sudan Independent Film Festival.
Perhaps it takes one born “in exile”, to represent Sudan today. As the older filmmakers in Talking About Trees, so this younger filmmaker can return now to his country and create a new cinema for today, international (this was produced with Egypt, France, Germany and Norway), universal as in a young man coming of age and taking his fate into his own hands, and particular to his own time and place. Such a talent as Amjad Abu Alala successfully depicts a young man living under the constraints of a small traditional society which is also a society of normal (that is, modern) functioning, as he loves, loses, becomes emotionally award in an environment that is economically secure and safe.
The lifetime of Muzamel, the movie’s protagonist, has been curtailed by the public proclamation made by his village’s religious leader that he will die at twenty. It happened at the ceremony when his parents brought him, their only child, for a blessing. This prophecy is too much for the father who consequently abandons his family. Isn’t that too often the way, the man saying to the woman, “you are strong, you can handle this on your own” when crises threaten the family unit’s well-being? Muzamel grows up with an overprotective mother and never manages to distract attention from the prophecy.
We witness young Muzamel’s destiny, his anxiety about his fate, and his transition into a young man as he struggles to flourish among his classmates in Quran classes by learning the sacred text of Islam by heart, or to affirm his personality in his first love relationship as he tries to find refuge and even salvation.
As the fatal year approaches, he encounters Suliman, an unwelcome figure in the town who has just returned from the city with his mistress who has given up her own preordained “normal” life to be with him. Muzamel’s process of self-questioning begins and he comes to see Suliman as the father he never had. An elderly cinema enthusiast, Suliman introduces the boy to his film projector, camera and movies, a discovery that tears Muzamel from the living cemetery in which he has already been buried and casts him into a paradise, the cinematic glimpses of life beyond which have a huge effect on him.
The story immerses us in an environment which is totally normal and yet totally exotic. Starting with the tribal prophecy and the role of traditional ministrations, we come to feel at home in this new environment in which the same human emotions are displayed as we would see in any society.
In some ways similar to last year’s award-winning Yomeddine from Egypt in that we become emotional participants in an environment we are not a part of but which we come to know as if it were our own, this film takes us on a journey where there are no familiar signposts, where the protagonist, a young man, finds his way, not only surviving but by learning the essentials of coming of age in an age where we are not the ones in control, until we consciously take control of our own destiny.
You Will Die at 20 premiered in Venice where it won the Lion of The Future Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best Debut Film, and continued on to Toronto and then El Gouna where it won The Golden Star for Narrative Film (trophy, certificate, and US $50,000). Next year it will likely be submitted by Sudan for the nomination for Best International Feature Academy Award.
International sales agent: Pyramide
2019 | 103 min |Arabic, with English Subtitles
Best Director:
Elia Sulieman It Must Be Heaven (OSN)| Palestine
Elia Suleiman was born on July 28, 1960 in Nazareth, Israel. He is married to Yasmine Hamdan.
Since first hearing his name in 1983 when he lived in New York (as did I then), where he made two short films, I often heard about him and so in 2002 I finally went to his film, Divine Intervention about Palestinian lovers from Jerusalem and Ramallah who are separated by a checkpoint and so arrange clandestine meetings. It was produced by the great French producer, Humbert Balsan, who died prematurely and tragically in 2005. Balsan helped several women directors put their projects together; Sandrine Veysset, Claire Denis and Brigitte Roüan owe him much. Likewise, great “foreign” filmmakers, particularly Arab, benefited from the support of Ognon Pictures, Balsan’s film company, among them, Youssef Chahine, Elia Suleiman, Yusri Nasrullah, and also James Ivory and Lars von Trier. The day of February 2005 when Humbert Balsan took his own life at the age of fifty was a day of mourning for French auteur cinema and of shock for the world’s cineastes who recalled stories of him during the Berlinale that year.
I was surprised by the originality of Divine Intervention, and really puzzled by his strange storytelling style. I had several conversations with my film friends during that Cannes in 2002 where it premiered and won the Jury Prize. Writing this today, I am even more surprised by the fact that it was his first feature film and he has only directed three other features since then. But he has appeared in 12 works and has received many thanks from other filmmakers . He is actively involved in the Doha Film Institute which has supported so many filmmakers over its life span of almost ten years.
Like It Must Be Heaven, Divine Intervention was comprised of several vignettes of Palestinian life in Eretz Israel — in a neighborhood in Nazareth and at Al-Ram checkpoint in East Jerusalem and had very little dialogue in Arabic, Hebrew, and English.
Elia Sulieman is a director and writer, known for Divine Intervention (2002), It Must Be Heaven (2019) and The Time That Remains (2009).
Sulieman was born July 28, 1960 in Nazareth into the Rûm Greek Orthodox religion. He lived in New York from 1982 to 1983 and since 1994 has taught at the Birzeit University in Ramallah. He is married to Yasmine Hamdan. He has a film production company in Paris and is represented by CAA.
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The 1st Critics Awards for Arab Films was held on the margins of the 70th Cannes Film Festival in 2018. The awards are given to the best Arab film productions every year in the following categories: Best Feature Film, Best Documentary Film, Best Director, Best Writer, Best Actress and Best Actor.
The final list of the nominees for the Critics Awards for Arab Films were selected according to the following criteria: the films must have been premiered at international film festivals outside of the Arab world during 2019, and at least one of the production companies must be Arab (regardless of the size of its contribution to the production of the film), in addition, the films must be feature-length films (fiction or documentary).
Organized by MAD Solutions in 2015, the Arab Cinema Center (ACC) is a nonprofit organization registered in Amsterdam. The ACC is an international promotional platform for Arab cinema as it provides the filmmaking industry with a professional window to connect with their counterparts from all over the world through a number of events that it organizes. The ACC also provides networking opportunities with representatives of companies and institutions specialized in co-production and international distribution, among others. The ACC’s activities vary between film markets, stands, and pavilions, networking sessions and one-on-one meetings bringing together Arab and foreign filmmakers, welcome parties, as well as meetings with international organizations and festivals, and the issuance of the Arab Cinema Magazine to be distributed at the leading international film festivals and markets.
Furthermore, newsletter subscription is now available on the ACC’s website, allowing users to obtain digital copies of the Arab Cinema Magazine, as well as news on the ACC’s activities, notifications of application dates for grants, festivals and offers from educational and training institutions, updates on Arab films participating at festivals, exclusive news on the Arab Cinema LAB, and highlights from the ACC’s partners and their future projects.
The ACC also launched an English-language Arab Cinema Guide, available on its website, which is a comprehensive cinematic guide that comprises a variety of tools presented collectively for the first time to offer information on Arab cinema to filmmakers inside and outside of the Arab world. It also aims to facilitate filmmakers’ access to international markets and help film industry representatives to easily identify Arab film productions.
