With a best actor win at the Venice Film Festival, massive receipts at the Lebanese box office and a possible Oscar nomination, Ziad Doueiri’s courtroom drama The Insult is certainly the most successful Arab film of the year - and the most controversial. Yet many of the released offerings lacked cohesion. Meanwhile, a new brave wave of gay cinema began to emerge, particularly in Lebanon with films such as Anthony Chidiac’s Room for a Man and Mohamed Sabbah’s Chronic. Gulf cinema continued its futile attempts in producing homegrown social dramas, to negligible results while Tunisian cinema - which has made enviable strides after the Jasmine Revolution - had a year to forget.
Many of the banks in these countries have halted transactions with their Qatari counterparts and governments are closely monitoring filmmakers accepting Qatari money.Įgypt suffered the most in 2017 with a perceptibly reduced festival participation and dwindling in production of independent film. At the same time, the blockade imposed on Qatar in June complicated funding opportunities.įunds from the regional powerhouse cinema hub Doha Film Institute – the most active film fund in the region – have become unofficially forbidden for filmmakers in the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Torn between the desire for formal innovation and the fetishistic western demands for habitual political stories, Arab cinema, once again, caved in to the latter, churning out yet another crop of pictures revolving around the same familiar themes: war and armed conflicts, subjection of women, immigration and western exile, and poverty porn.Ĭensorship has tightened its grip over cinema across the region. This year, the vast majority of debutant Arab films were greeted with less enthusiasm by festivals and press alike. Thanks to the refugee crisis and the ascendance of the right in Europe and the US, Arab films continue to be the flavour of the week, becoming a regular fixture in the world’s top art-house film markets and garnering unprecedented attention from international press. Coming on the heels of 2016 that saw the likes of Clash, Tramontane, Hedi and The Best of Us storming the world’s biggest film fests, 2017, by comparison, feels like a letdown. If there's one consistent aspect about Arab cinema, it is its persistent lack of consistency.
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