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Discover dives into travel, culture, food & arts of the Middle East and North Africa, giving you an authentic insight into the life and history of the region
Joined November 2018
📚Book review | The Most American King: Jordan’s Abdullah II and the craft of survival
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Films play second fiddle to Gaza controversies for the third year running at the Berlinale. German politicians and journalists reacted angrily to repeated statements of Palestinian solidarity by Arab and Hollywood filmmakers
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Why a group of digital linguists are trying to revive the long-extinct Phoenician language
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“The Egyptian reaction toward El Sett is reflective of a nation with no confidence in a regime whose calamitous economic policies have led to an overreliance on generous donors like Saudi Arabia for a lifeline,” concludes Fahim
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“What the film most notably lacks is a point of view: stylistic, political, philosophical. It is an intellectually bankrupt piece of unadventurous filmmaking” 🎬 Review by Joseph Fahim
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“Yet the most unforgivable, most maddening aspect of El Sett is its befuddling approach to Umm Kulthum’s music. Mourad and Hamed do not spend a minute of the film’s 2.5 hour duration explaining or reflecting on what made her music so unique and so transcendent,” writes Fahim
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With three other films having been made depicting the life of the Egyptian singer, Fahim questions the motives for making another. “Random switching between black-and-white and colour; slow-motion; preening crane shots; invasive close-ups… there is no cohesive visual strategy”
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Fahim writes that the film misses several key aspects of her politics, which played a role in her music, popularity and influence during a crucial time for Egypt, arguing that “less flattering aspects of her life and career have been deliberately ignored”
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"For all her prowess and faux independence, (writer Ahmed) Mourad’s Umm Kulthum ultimately comes off as a forlorn waif in a futile search for marital happiness and romantic love"
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“Art plays little role in this version of Umm Kulthum’s story; her life pursuit is capitalist through and through,” writes Fahim, criticising the film’s depiction of her motivations for becoming a singer
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Fahim argues that “one of the movie’s significant flaws is that the gender fluidity embodied by the pre-fame Umm Kulthum goes entirely unexamined, setting the tone for a picture too tame to dig deeper into the thornier issues that defined the singer’s life and art”
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Overall, writes Fahim, “Egyptians remain unwilling to accept anything but a sanitised depiction of their icons, and yet another indication of the growing popular disdain toward Saudi influence in the nation’s entertainment industry”
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Weeks after El Sett's release in Egypt and the region - in one of the widest releases for any Egyptian film this century - the Saudi-backed biopic has been a colossal flop, writes Fahim. In Egypt, pundits accused it of tarnishing the legendary singer's image
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🧵 With a price tag of $8m excluding marketing, and a star-studded cast El Sett (The Woman, one of the many titles given to Umm Kulthum) was expected to smash box-office records - but it didn't. 🎬 Film reviewer Joseph Fahim examines why ⤵️
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Emerging in the late Ottoman era, Jewish scholars studied a vast array of works by medieval Arab scholars to establish a body of work that became crucial to Zionist colonisation ⤵️ https://t.co/LJMWWzuUAi
middleeasteye.net
Emerging in the late Ottoman era, Jewish scholars studied a vast array of works by medieval Arab scholars to establish a body of work that became crucial to Zionist colonisation
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P21 Gallery’s new film club kicked off on 27 January 🎬✨ It launched with a screening of Al-Nakba and a Q&A with filmmaker Rawan Damen. Plenty more Arab films to come, don’t miss the next one! ☕️🇵🇸🎥
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