BAMcinématek presents Contemporary Arab Cinema and Wajib + The Films of Annemarie Jacir

This fall, BAMcinématek presents two series highlighting contemporary cinema from the Arab world. From Saturday, September 29 through Thursday, October 4 Contemporary Arab Cinema comes to BAM for the first time. Curated by Lina Matta, the series showcases the complexity of Arab culture through new works from some of the Middle East and North Africa's boldest and most innovative filmmakers. Multiple filmmakers will be in attendance during the series. From October 5 through October 11, following Contemporary Arab Cinema, BAMcinématek presents Wajib + The Films of Annemarie Jacir, an exclusive week-long run of Jacir's latest film and the first New York retrospective of the Palestinian filmmaker's work. Jacir will be in attendance opening weekend for post-screening Q&As.

Jacir's career consists of a string of pioneering firsts. Her Columbia University thesis film, Like Twenty Impossibles (2003-Oct 7), screened at the Cannes Film Festival and became the first short film from the Arab world to be included in the festival's official selection. At the same time, Jacir became the first Palestinian filmmaker to have a film screen at the storied festival. Jacir's latest film, Wajib (2018, Oct 5-11), stars frequent Jacir collaborator Saleh Bakri alongside his real-life father, legendary Arabic actor Mohammed Bakri. Set in Nazareth, this dark comedy observes the bubbling tensions between a progressive son and traditionalist father and speaks to THE DIVIDE between the Palestinian diaspora and those who remain in Israel. The film screened in competition at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival and at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Films of Annemarie Jacir includes Jacir's feature films Salt of This Sea (2008-Oct 7) and When I Saw You (2012-Oct 7). Salt of This Sea, which screens with Like Twenty Impossibles, depicts a Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American woman who seeks to reclaim the ancestral land taken from her grandfather in 1948. Jacir's second feature, When I Saw You (2012-Oct 7), tells the story of an 11-year-old boy who runs away from a refugee camp in Jordan and joins a group of Palestinian guerilla fighters following the Six-Day War in 1967. When I Saw You screens with Palestine, Summer 2006 (2006), Jacir's short film about the political gulf separating Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Following its run at Jacob Burns Film Center (Sep 20-27), Contemporary Arab Cinema includes Beauty and the Dogs (Ben Hania, 2017-Sep 29), a feminist cri de coeur about a Tunisian college student pitted against a patriarchal bureaucratic system that seeks to silence her following her rape. Also featured in the series: Palestinian director Muayad Alayan's The Reports on Sarah and Saleem (2018-Sep 29) about a casual extramarital affair between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man that snowballs into a political crisis; acclaimed Lebanese director Philippe Aractingi's Listen (2017-Sep 30), a sexy, sophisticated romance about lost love; THE JOURNEY (Al Daradji, 2017-Sep 30) about a young woman who arrives at Baghdad Central Station prepared to carry out a suicide attack; and Zagros (Omar Kalifa, 2017-Oct 1), about a Kurdish wife and mother who starts a new life in Belgium only to be followed by her jealous husband.

The series also includes the documentaries Les Petits Chats (Nakhla, 2015-Sep 29), which follows the Egyptian rock band Les Petits Chats and celebrates a golden age in Egyptian culture when music, art, and cinema flourished; The Man Behind the Microphone (Belhassine, 2017-Oct 3), which looks at Tunisia's cultural evolution through a revealing portrait of the "Frank Sinatra of Tunisia;" and Investigating Paradise (Allouache, 2017-Oct 2), a documentary-narrative hybrid that investigates how "the theology of death" is used in jihadist recruitment in Algeria.

Other features in the series include Lucien Bourjeily's Heaven Without People (2017-Oct 3), about a sprawling Lebanese family's contentious Easter lunch celebration; The Blessed (Djama, 2017-Oct 4), which traces the reverberating effects of Algeria's 1990s civil war on two generations of Algerians living in the country's present day police state; and Induced Labor (Diab, 2017-Sep 30), a dark comedy about an Egyptian couple who plan a takeover of the American embassy in order to secure an American passport so their children can be born US citizens.

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