#mohammad malas

[binnte-dil]

حلب... مقامات المسرة / Aleppo… Maqamat of Pleasure and Delight (Mohammad Malas, 1998)

[edwordsmyth]

Al-Manam (The Dream), Mohammad Malas (1987)

[underthejasminetrees]

الليل

Al-Leil (The Night), Mohammad Malas, Omar Amiralay, 1992

[andquietrollsthedawn]

Aleppo Maqamat of Pleasure and Delight (Mohammad Malas, 1998)

[treethymes]

The Night الليل (1992, dir. Mohammad Malas)

[ueberdemnebelmeer]

My cinematic generation didn’t just come up with a topic or address an issue, but I can safely state that we managed to establish our own language. And this wasn’t a traditional language. […] With al-Leil I had an opportunity to lay the foundation for a structure that was entirely mine. I dedicated 20 years of my life to talking about this ancestral home of mine, Quneitra, with all its nightmares and dreams, with every vision that I developed into film, and carried from one film to another, with the purpose of composing a visual, sentimental and personal work. This is, as Tarkovsky calls it, a carving of history. This is a search for time from a personal perspective, not just a historical perspective. To me, the time of that vague love for the ancestral home, towards the mother and the lost father, and to the political era, which is also lost, or Quneitra in al-Leil – all of this is an attempt to express that pain, that loss, which pierces your connection to reality with the peculiar flavours of alienation and longing.

—MOHAMMAD MALAS in The Cinema of Muhammad Malas: Vision of a Syrian Auteur, edited by Samirah Alkassim, Nezar Andary (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)

[loneberry]

Images Festival

Tomorrow, at 12pm in Toronto, after a screening of Mohammad Malas's film The Dream, I will be in conversation with Palestinian curator and writer Nasrin Himada.

Buy tickets for the screening here.

The Dream, a film by Mohammad Malas, is filmed in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, shortly before the massacre of 1982. Malas’s documentary focuses on dreams and dreaming by documenting Palestinians recounting their dreams. In this way, the film plays on a double register, whereby Palestinians recall the reality of their everyday lives transposed into their dreams, nightmares, and premonitions. Ultimately, these dreams tell the story of longing for our land: the dreams make the light. Malas is a prolific filmmaker, working in art, fiction, and documentary. After teaching philosophy at Damascus University in the 1960s, he turned to film and has since produced numerous award-winning works, notably a series of powerful documentaries on political prisoners in the Arab world. He has also published novels and writes frequently on Arab cinema.

[falsenote]

The Night (1992)