Films
Index / Activities / Films / “The Children of the Dead”: film forum and poetry recital
“The Children of the Dead”: film forum and poetry recital
November 03, 2021 6:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62).
6:00 p.m.
Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached. Masks are required at all times.
Films shown in the original language version with subtitles in Spanish.
To mark the dates on which different cultures remember the deceased, Casa Árabe has organized an event that combines both audiovisuals and poetry. We are presenting the documentary Los hijos de los muertos (The Children of the Dead), by Luay Albasha, and a poetry recital in Arabic and Spanish curated by Ahmad Yamani, with the participation of musician Kaveh Sarvarian.
Al Arafa, located in the heart of Cairo, is the oldest cemetery in Egypt. It is a place where history and the forgotten come together with death, but also with life. This funerary space is currently inhabited by over 50,000 families in Cairo. The documentary film "The Children of the Dead" (25 min.) by Luay Albasha takes an up-close look at the lives of some of the graveyard’s inhabitants to learn more about their concerns, an existence marked by stigma and their abandonment, but also by the natural way in which they cope with living so close to the “other side.” After a talk with the film’s director, the event will continue with a bilingual recital curated by poet Ahmad Yamani, including texts by Amal Dunqul, Salah Abdel Sabour, Abbas Beydoun, Murid Barguti, Ángel Guinda, César Vallejo, Leopoldo María Panero, Agustín Porras and Yamani himself, as well as others. Musician Kaveh Sarvarian will accompany the recital with his ney and other wind instruments. The event will be presented by Karim Hauser of Casa Árabe.
Luay Albasha (Castellón, 1995) is a freelance photographer and documentary filmmaker based in Barcelona. A native of Syria and Palestine, he became interested in photography and film at the early age of 12, when he began using his father’s camera. After finishing his bachelor’s degree, Luay moved on to the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, and in 2016 he specialized in documentary filmmaking and photography at the Oulu University of Applied Science in Finland. After completing his thesis on the role of international media in the Syrian civil war, he moved to Barcelona to pursue a graduate degree in Photojournalism (2017-2018) at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. He made two documentaries before The Children of the Dead.
Ahmad Yamani (Cairo, 1970), an Egyptian poet living in Madrid, holds a PhD in Arabic Philology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he has been an associate professor. He works as a reporter for the Arabic broadcast of Radio Nacional de España. He has had six collections of poems published in Arabic, and a selection of his poetry translated into Spanish, Refugio de huesos (Bone Shelter, Olifante, 2015). He has been bestowed with several awards, and some of his poems have been translated into other languages. He has translated the work of several Spanish-language authors from both Spain and Latin America into Arabic.