04 January 2006

DUBAI: The unsung heroes of cinema are short filmmakers - a reference not to their height but to the length of their movies. While publishers have allowed the short story a niche of respectability to complement the novel, commercial distributors, cinemas and audience expectations make it difficult for shorts to be recognized as a legitimate genre.

Since they seldom find a venue outside festivals and repertory theaters, shorts are seen as inherently weak - the form film students cut their teeth on and remain with only until they can rally the funds to start shooting features.

A quick survey of this year's "Arabian Shorts" program at the Dubai International Film Festival - which included documentaries and fictions inside an hour in length - suggests that some filmmakers do emulate the breadth of a feature by miniaturizing it. Others are interested in working within the confines of the short form.

Whether it's a comment on the form or the skill of execution, documentarians seem more adept at short treatments than those attempting "featurettes."

Programmer Mohamed Makhlouf favors innovation and edge over the hackneyed and maudlin, and most of the five documentaries he chose offer close profiles, focusing on individuals or small ensembles.

The exception is Alberto Arce and Maria Moreno's "Internationals in Palestine" (2005), the most programmatic (and diffuse) of the documentaries. "Internationals" doesn't merely document international activists' engagement with the Israeli Army's human rights violations, it seeks to recruit volunteers.

It's challenging. When they turn their camera upon the internationals themselves and their sometimes incongruous rhetoric - "Hey soldiers can you say / how many kids have you killed today?" - it may not have the effect they have in mind.

The filmmakers seem aware, though, that the inconvenience and danger undergone by holiday activists is a fraction of that suffered by Palestinians, so a home-grown activist gets most screen time.

A more compelling ensemble story is "Women in Struggle" (2004) from first-timer Buthana Canaan Khoury. Set in contemporary Palestine - roadblocks, detentions, house demolitions, the separation wall - it focuses on the experiences of four Palestinian women arrested for their resistance work. Most have overlapping experiences of physical and psychological torture and rape during Israeli detention.

Ensemble casts of women are also the subjects of Djamel Sallani's "Women of the Algerian War" (2004), which intersperses the testimonies of three women who resisted Paris' colonial occupation. Sherif al-Bindary addresses rather different women's issues with "Six Girls" (2005). It follows a group of young women university students from Port Said contending with disapproving social mores when they take a flat together in Cairo.

Affecting as these examinations of women's lives are as media of disclosure, the strongest of Dubai's documentaries in 2005 is Saeed Taji Farouky's "I See the Stars at Noon" (2004), a portrait of one Moroccan man's labors to navigate the illegal migration to Spain (the "Hijra Siriyya").

Farouky's is a nuanced profile of an intelligent and increasingly desperate man. Its strengths lie not in his subject's being more pertinent, or representative, but in the infusion of additional artistic complexity - namely the ethics of the documentary process as the filmmaker becomes implicated in the story.

The quality of the eight "featurettes" in "Arabian Shorts" varies greatly, as does the subject matter, ranging from engaged fictions to genre pieces.

Among the former are Syrian director Bassam Hussein's "The Mask" (2004), a silent tale of whiskey-swilling generals watching a film - redolent of surveillance and censorship. "Attention" (2005), by Saudi-based Syrian director Akram Agha, is a three-minute-long anti-war animation.

"Yasmin's Song" (2005), from well-known Palestinian documentarian Najwa Najjar, is a valiant effort to distill Israel's compounding of Palestine's social crisis into 18 minutes.

The story focuses on the frustrated love of struggling Ziad and Yasmin, who is being thrust into arranged marriage. In her efforts to depict the complexities of social conservatism, economic hardship, creeping Islamism, and the dislocation caused by Israel's separation wall, it's clear that Najjar has a full-length feature in mind.

The strongest socially engaged "featurette" is "Today, 30th September," by Egypt's Mahmoud Soliman. This 19-minute film works because it gives the minor characters just enough socially cued flesh and bone (and direction) to fulfill their role in hinting at the stresses afflicting Cairene youth. The through-line of the narrative is that of a lone central character, though in this Soliman benefits from the solid acting ability of Basim Samra - veteran of several of Yousri Nasrallah's features.

Another strong performance drives Timon Koulmasis' lyrical road movie "What Color are the Walls of Your Apartment." The European art film of the program, it follows Maria (Maria Kechaioglou), a young, emotionally distraught, Greek woman as she arrives in Palestine and drives to an intense, ambiguous encounter with an older Palestinian man.

The three genre movies in the selection are more or less derivative, and effective.

"Cow and Company," from Algerian helmer Yahia Mouzahem, is a broad comedy taking its cue from the medieval ideal of the "circle of equity," which supposedly bound society's different orders in duties and obligations. Mouzahem flips the equation to suggest that the various elements of Algerian society - dairy farmer, mechanic, satellite-dish repairer, schoolteacher (cartoon characters all) - are corrupt and out to cheat one another.

Swiss-Algerian Hicham al-Hayat produced, directed and wrote "Haunted," the program's horror film a la "Ringu." A mood piece, it follows a young man as he apparently breaks into an archetypal haunted house, sits in the dark apparently surfing television channels on a night dominated by slasher flicks. Over the course of 15 minutes, though, the distinction between entertainment and reality dissolve, and rather confusingly.

The most surprising of the shorts is "Alliance" (2005). A 33-minute Lebanese-American time-space odyssey from rookie helmer Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad and producer Jamal Seedi, "Alliance" lays claim to being the first Arabic sci-fi flick ever.

Set in the 24th century, it's riddled with characters and special effects (closer to 80s-era "Battlestar Galactica" than "Episode III"). The acting is reminiscent of the LucasFilm stable, though, as is the writing - it's premised on an ancient tablet that may save the planet from an inconvenient intergalactic invasion.

Aesthetics aside, "Alliance" is staffed with nice Muslim-Arab characters and a smattering of actors with Arabic-sounding names, presenting positive role models from this region while being utterly divorced from contemporary Middle Eastern realities.

Of all Makhlouf's children it's also got the most commercial street sense - speaking English and ending with a hook for a sequel.