Tufts Arabic Program Presents: Layali Cinema
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Tufts Arabic Program Presents: Layali Cinema Layali Cinema this year aims to shed light on the diversity and complexity of the Middle East, telling stories ranging from the Jewish community of Iraq, to the Amazigh/Berber populations of North Africa, the Druze and Christian communities of the Levant, the Kurds, and more. September 21 Forget Baghdad is a reflection about the stereotypes of “Jew” and “Arab” through one 7:30pm Olin 11 hundred years of film, told through the personal stories of four Iraqi Jewish communists. The protagonists are Shimon Ballas, a writer and professor of Arabic studies living between Tel Aviv and Paris; the best‐selling Israeli author Sami Michael; Moshe Houri, a real estate developer; and Samir Naqqash, an author who writes exclusively in Arabic. October 26 7:30pm Olin 11 Set in the Golan Heights, The Syrian Bride follows Mona (Clara Khoury), an Arab Druze woman about to be married to a Syrian soap opera star. Once she crosses from the Israeli‐occupied Golan Heights into Syria, she will be unable to ever return, forcing her to leave her family and the life she had behind. November 15 7:30pm Olin 11 West Beirut is set in April 1975, as civil war breaks out in the cosmopolitan city known as the “Paris of the Middle East”. The Lebanese capital quickly divides along Muslim‐Christian lines into East and West. Tarek, an easygoing high school student passionate about filmmaking, doesn’t take the fighting seriously at first. Schools are closed, the violence is fascinating, and sneaking across no man’s land to the other side is a game. But the war moves inexorably from an adventure to a nationwide tragedy. November 29 7:30pm Olin 11 Son of Babel begins in northern Iraq, two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. On hearing news that hundreds of people long presumed dead have been found alive in a southern Iraq prison, a Kurdish grandmother takes along her 12‐year‐old grandson Ahmed to discover the fate of his father, who has been missing since the Gulf War. From the mountains of Kurdistan to the sands of Babylon, they hitch rides from strangers and cross paths with fellow pilgrims, as Iraqis struggling to come to grips with its dark history after bloody wars, a brutal dictatorship, and an unfamiliar new foreign military occupation. The story of Ahmed and his grandmother also tells us about the decades‐long repression of the Kurdish minority in Iraq. Sponsored by the Charles Smith Fund, SPIRIT and the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies .