Essential Cinema: Films of the Middle East and Beyond

The series run from January 12 through February 16, 2010, and screenings for this month include:

Cairo Station
Tues Jan 12, 7 PM
The bustling Cairo train station is the setting for a dramatic love triangle involving Kenaoui, a handicapped newspaper vendor (played by the director himself Youssef Chahine), Hanouma, a voluptuous lemonade seller, and her fiancé Abou Serib, a muscular train porter involved in union organizing. This classic 1959 Egyptian film noir was banned in Egypt for twenty years after its controversial premiere.

The Land (Al-ard)
Tues Jan 19, 7 PM
Considered by many critics to be one of Chahine's finest films, in the classic The Land Chahine focuses his lens on the plight of the peasants in a small village exploited by a powerful local landowner, at a time that Britain and the corrupt Egyptian monarchy still run the country.

Laila's Birthday
Tues Jan 26, 7 PM
Written and directed by Rashid Masharawi, Laila's Birthday centers around a Palestinian taxi driver (and former judge) in Ramallah who wants to make his daughter’s 7th birthday a very special one, but first he must spend his day making money picking up passengers. Each person who gets in and out of his cab reveals a bit of their lives -- young lovers simply wanting a place to be together, a man recently freed from prison, a woman unable to decide whether to go to a hospital or cemetery first, and a man who leaves his cell phone in the cab and creates chaos for the cab driver. In the course of the day Masharawi shows a Palestinian city often in the news but never observed in such objective detail.