Salah Abu Saif

In der Village Voice stellt Michael Atkinson den ägyptischen Regisseur Salah Abu Saif vor, dem eine Retrospektive im Walter Reade Theater gewidmet ist. Freundlicher als im Folgenden wird's aber nicht:

From the evidence we have to go on, Abou Seif was no stylist, or much of a formal thinker, but he comprised a kind of front-guard norm in mainstream Egyptian filmmaking, leaping from genre to genre with ease and making a consistent effort to steer the cinematic colloquy away from opulent-yet-pious nonsense and toward a social consciousness.

Kurz vorgestellt werden auch weitere arabische Filme; besonders interessant klingt Faouzi Bensaidis A Thousand Months (2003):

Better still, Faouzi Bensaidi's A Thousand Months (2003), probably the first Moroccan film to find its way into the New York Film Festival, is the only breakaway "art film" in the series—meaning Bensaidi, an ex-Téchiné associate, has absorbed the brine of Kiarostami and Hou, and composes his little-village satire in long, distanced, obliquely composed shots that allow you to occupy the dusty space on your own cognizance, and discover the characters (a boy cursed with caretaking his teacher's chair 24-7, a technician who covertly pulls the plug on the town's one TV every night so he can regale his girlfriend with the shows' unseen climaxes, an appointed official subject to self-destructive satyrdom, etc.) at your leisure.