09 November 2010

BEIRUT: Commerce, as many Lebanese are proud to point out, is what drives life in this city, which goes far to explain its cinematic offerings. If you put aside Beirut’s several film festivals, most of the movies projected in Lebanon are Western (generally American) commercial releases.

Alternatively, there are a few film aficionados – clustered around the universities and, more fitfully, some nightclub spaces – who try to cater to more refined tastes with cinema clubs.

The challenge facing the cineclub in an audio-visual environment ruled by considerations of profit and loss is that commercial cinema (and its spawn on television and YouTube) cultivates audiences more likely to be impressed by special effects, celebrity actors and toilet humor than beautiful framing, subtle storytelling and nuanced acting.

What to do? Beirut’s Metropolis Art Cinema – the Middle East and North Africa region’s only independently run, unsubsidized art house cinema – has, with the help of the Swiss, devised a solution of sorts.

Starting this Friday, November 12, Metropolis’ tri-lingual cineclub “The Magic Lantern” will give kids aged 8-12 the opportunity to discover the joys of fine movies made for people their age – and projected in a movie theater, the way they were meant to be seen.

It’s Metropolis’ premise that children’s innate amazement with cinema makes them a determined and critical audience. The aim of “The Magic Lantern” is to give kids the chance to go to the cinema independently, allowing them to share their feelings and perspectives with people their own age, while providing their parents the reassurance that they will be under the surveillance of responsible adults and expert cinema guides.

A range of films have been selected for projection. Classics from cinema history – the serials of silent-film comic icons Laurel and Hardy (1927-1932) and Charlie Chaplin – will be screened alongside locally obscure European fare – like “Max & Co” (2007), by Swiss directors Frederic and Samuel Guillaume – and unexpected gems from the UK commercial industry – Nick Park and Peter Lord’s “Chicken Run” (2000).

Other directors whose works will be screened are France’s Albert Lamorisse, China’s Lee Jung-Hyang, Iran’s Majid Majidi and the US’ Charles Bowers.

The cineclub will continue over nine months with a film each month. A few days before each session, kids registered to participate in “The Magic Lantern” will receive an illustrated journal of the program, in Arabic, English and French.

Before each screening, the cineclub’s animateurs will prepare the kids for the projection with an entertaining and informative performance to explain the subject of the movie.

The roots of this project extend back one year, when – in an effort to bring concerns about cinema to school children and to diversify their audience – Metropolis proposed cinema-related educational activities in Lebanese schools. The outreach was such a success that Metropolis decided to continue this work, bringing other activities into their cinemas in order to reach an even wider audience.

The main aim of this community outreach, said Metropolis founder and director Hania Mroue, has been to arouse children’s curiosity. “We want to introduce the kids to fun, to allow them to realize how the screenings work, and why various cinematographic techniques are used.”

The objective of “The Magic Lantern,” she continued, is to enrich and extend children’s knowledge of cinema.

The project is supported by the Swiss Embassy and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation – which aims to improve international education for children and young adults.

“The Magic Lantern” was created in Switzerland  in 1992 with the object of cultivating children’s sensitivity to cinema, regardless of their class, communitarian or religious backgrounds.

“This project also aims at developing intercultural relations and considering children as human beings,” says Carine Carey, first assistant to the Swiss ambassador. “‘The Magic Lantern’ brings history, aesthetics, techniques and pleasure in the theater.”

For the Swiss Embassy, this project enables children “to widen their knowledge away from their parents, in an atmosphere that will develop their sense of responsibility.”


Cineclub applications can be found by logging on to: http://www.metropoliscinema.net/images/LM_application_form.pdf. Membership cards cost LL75,000 each, and LL50,000 for every additional child a family enrolls. For more information see www.metropoliscinema.net or call +961 1 204 080 /+961 3 524 400.

Copyright The Daily Star 2010.