Writing from Abu Dhabi, Hani Mustafa delights in stories of the displaced The fifth round of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival started this week; each year new leaps are evident, testifying to the dedication of the executive director Peter Scarlet, who chooses a fair number of important films produced within the previous year. Most will have been premiered in the top pick of festivals prior to their arrival in Abu Dhabi �ê" Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, Locarno �ê" but they nonetheless make up a powerful programme that encourages discussion and debate among filmmakers and critics. This year the negative effects of the financial meltdown are evident even here, in the Middle East's richest festival; while previous rounds were held at the Emirates Festival, one of the world's most luxurious and expensive hotels, this hotel it has relocated to the Vermont Hotel. Still, the opening celebration was held in the hotel's open-air beach theatre, and luxury was still in abundance. The fifth round has no title but it is clear that the curators have an idea of the programme nonetheless: a majority of films deal with the life of immigrants and refugees; still, the selection is not limited to films with such direct themes, some even feature immigrants only as secondary characters where immigration becomes a hue in the background. The opening film can be seen as a way into the theme of this year's round, the Canadian filmmaker Philippe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar. The hero, Bashir Lazhar, is an Algerian refugee in Montreal, and the dramatic structure of the film, a kind of late-in-the-day Canadian To Sir with Love (James Clavell's famous Sixties feature starring Sidney Poitier) is vaguely classical. It tells the story of the human connection growing between students at a school and their new teacher, which eventually takes the form of a one-way exchange from the teacher who possesses knowledge, intelligence and compassion to the students who begin to change as a result of their interaction with him. The filmmaker however has developed that classical idea, adding a number of dimensions the most significant of which is that the new teacher is in fact a refugee while the students are children. The film opens with two students finding out, on an ice-cold school day, that their class teacher has killed herself by hanging inside the classroom. Bashir arrives at the school to take over her job; like any refugee, he is after work, and he manages to convince the schoolmistress that he can fill the gap. It is then that the drama begins for real, with Bashir understanding the psychological state of the students after the shock �ê" perhaps their first �ê" of a close person dying in this way. The new teacher cannot forgive his predecessor the fact that she has done her deed within the classroom itself, which is the greatest source of anguish for the students. As time passes we realise that Bashir, whose empathy with the students has already come across as somewhat intense, is suffering from a similar experience of shock: his family are casualties of the civil war in Algeria during the 1990s; he could not save them from being burned alive in his own house. He was even framed for starting the fire, which is how he became a refugee unable ever to return to Algeria. Thus what brings the children and Bashir together is rather more than a To-Sir-with-Love connection. The films stands out for its noble perspective on human relations, of which there is a great dose. The warmth is helped along by the presence of a large number of excellent acting performances especially by the children who were coached brilliantly by the filmmaker. Still, there are structural problems since there are obstacles that remain unresolved: why would a Montreal school mistress employ a refugee without qualifications or even proper identity papers, for example? (It is not until the end that we realise Bashir has not completed the required papers �ê" he is in fact dismissed as soon as he is officially recognised as a refugee, as demanded by one of the children's families who have found out about his status.) As the children realise they will be obliged to complete the year without the teacher to whom they have grown close, the d��nouement descends into melodrama. Among the Abu Dhabi Festival's greatest virtues is that it offers an invaluable service to Arabs interested in art-house cinema around the world. Maiwenn Le Besco's Polisse, which won the jury prize at the Cannes Festival, is one such film. Le Besco not only wrote and directed but also acted in the film. The screenwriter lodges herself in a children's affairs division of the Paris Police, using it as a base for presenting the ins and outs of French society and the nature of problems and errors in parent-children relations. Most of the issues at stake relate to paedophilia whether the abuse is perpetrated by a parent or a stranger, and in the process presents the range of French social phenomena including immigrant communities: African, Arab and Romanian. The officers themselves make up an ethno-cultural mosaic of African and Maghrebi as well as white men. Still, the principal element relates to family connections with which those officers are faced. Life is extremely stressful between what problems the officers have and what they must deal with in terms of other people's problems. The power of the film has to do with its unorthodox, non-linear approach to narrative. Le Besco manages to move through a network of plotlines, moving with impressive ease from one to another. The principal locus is the office out of which officers and social workers operate, which provides a sort of central station for changing from one line to the next. The film ends with the suicide of one of the women employed at the division after the announcement of promotions following the summer vacation. Worth noting is that the French police under Sarkozy seems to have had an extremely bad reputation; on first impressions it is as if this film is an attempt to give the police back some of its due respect in the light of the bloody events of 2005, when Sarkozy was minister of the interior. Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi's Chicken with Plums, which almost received Venice's Golden Lion last month, is Satrapi's second collaboration, after the animation film version of her graphic novel Persepolis, with Paronnaud. Since it premiered in 2007, due to the presence in it of the character of Allah as imagined by a child, the film has been subject to attacks by Islamists: a huge man with white hair and beard. The latest in a string of reactions was after it was screened in a Tunis theatre a few days ago resulting in acts of hooliganism by protesting Islamists. As with Persepolis, the story takes place in mid-20th-century Iran, and it is told in an unusual way. They use an extremely complex geometric narrative structure: a seemingly eccentric, depressed fiddler in his 50s living in Tehran, Nasser Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric), buys a new violin from someone, and once he takes possession of the instrument turns to a woman he calls by the name Iran, who turns to him completely expressionless. He reminds her of himself, but she insists she cannot remember him at all. Thus the opening scene: the film is made up of several such scenes which, as they appear, separate and surprising, explain that starting point. We find out about Khan's relations with his wife and brother, his musical history and his love story with the woman named Iran as a student. The screenplay pays no attention to chronology, with each episode functioning as an independent story that nonetheless contributes to a view of the fiddler's untraditional life. A successful musician who returns home to marry on orders from his mother (Isabella Rossellini), Nasser Ali ends up leading a conventional life with a woman who hates his profession so much she destroys the most treasured of his instruments, the violin he was given by his schoolteacher and continued to use. Many scenes are extraneous to the story, but each �ê" Khan dreaming of the film star Sophia Loren joining him in bed, for example �ê" is a beautiful audiovisual narrative in its own right. There is much magic and expressionism; it is often comic: sometimes through the absurd, sometimes in the style of Fellini. The acting, though exaggerated, fits the otherworldly mould. When Nasser Ali accompanies his teacher to the summit of a mountain, for example, it is as if he is the student in a classic martial arts movie. Recalling Le fabuleux destine d'Amelie in several respects �ê" including unrealistical colour saturation, Chicken with Plums is an extremely absorbing and entertaining film. ... Each year the Abu Dhabi festival features newly refurbished old films presented by the film historian Serge Bromberg in their Middle East premieres: last year it presented Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis; this year it presents a number of works from the period 1903-23, accompanied by Bromberg's own performance on the organ. Three films from 1903 were filmed in Egypt, featuring the fellahin employing ancient irrigation methods in the countryside, the moulid or saint's anniversary celebrations, and the Karnak Temple in Luxor. There was a 1907 fantasy about a butterfly collector captured by the butterflies themselves, Buster Keaton's 1923 comedy The Love Nest, which features Keaton's adventures working on a whaling ship named Love Nest �ê" only to wake up from sleep, and Georges Melies's 1902 A Trip to the Moon, among the earliest sci-fi flicks in existence, which revolves around a number of scientists undertaking an experiment to reach the moon �ê" where they discover various aliens from whom they escape back to earth having captured one. A Trip to the Moon was renovated and screened at Cannes, but this is its Middle East premiere, and it features new original music by the duo Air, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel. The effect was less strange than it sounds. The silent films were screened in a programme named Family Day, a function they served brilliantly, engaging the children in a remarkable
