For several years now, cinema in the Arab world has proven to have a great ability to reflect Arab societies’ complex reality. The work by these directors, many of whom are exceptional documentary film makers, has provided privileged testimony to these years of important social and political transformations. However, Arab film also continues to produce fictional productions with a heavy dosage of creativity and sophistication. Casa Árabe is devoting its film schedule in May and June to four recent works which highlight this facet among many directors. In some cases, the films will take us back to Arab cinema’s years of splendor. This is the specific case with Décor, an homage to the classical films of Egyptian cinema directed by Ahmad Abdalla, some of whose most successful films (like Microphone or Heliopolis) have been included in the film series shown at Casa Árabe. 

This series also includes the latest major Jordanian production, Wolf (Theeb), Naji Abu Nowar’s debut as a director. His adventure film, set in the era and landscapes of Lawrence of Arabia, was nominated for best foreign film at the Oscar Awards of 2016. Palestine’s interesting and prolific world of film production has brought us The Wanted 18, co-directed by Palestinian Amer Shomali and Canadian Paul Cowan, an original work which mixes animated drawings and stop-motion animation with historical archive footage and interviews with main role-players in Palestinian civil society during the first Intifada. Last of all, we deal with a hot topic of the day, the arrival of refugees in Europe, in all its complexity (and often with great irony), with the Norwegian feature Letter to the King, by a director of Iraqi Kurdish origin, Hicham Zaman. Bearing witness to the acknowledgment and quality of the four films which make up this series is the fact that all of them have received awards at international festivals over the last two years.