Hani Mustafa, in Abu Dhabi, samples what the youngest Arab film festival has to offer The fourth Abu Dhabi Film Festival opened with a screening of the short film Accordion by the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was released from prison after a hunger strike in May; numerous world artists had expressed support for Panahi during the last Cannes Film Festival. Actress Juliette Binoche, for example, held up a sign bearing his name when she went up to receive the best actress prize for her role in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy. Panahi, who received the Golden Lion in Venice for The Circle in 2000, had been arrested after he expressed support for presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and became part of the Green Revolution in 2009. Here as in Cannes, participants and organisers alike were eager to express their opposition to the political oppression of artists. Accordion, a simple eight-minute feature, is the story of a boy and a girl who go around playing music in return for change: the boy plays accordion, the girl tabla. When the girl, who has thus far seemed largely androgynous, discovers she is at the entrance to a mosque, she is scared and quickly puts on hijab. Soon a man is loudly admonishing the boy for playing music in front of the mosque: a scuffle ensues between the man, who is trying to take away the instrument, and impromptu defenders of the boy; but the man manages to take away the accordion in the end, and the rest of the film is the story of the two children searching for the man in the attempt to retrieve their accordion, only to discover him trying to play for money somewhere else. Panahi has been described as a "street director" for his remarkable ability to deploy the Iranian street to stunning effect, a principal aspect of The Circle too . In Accordion, the message is clear: populist religious authority and its contradictions, with the absurdity of gender segregation and the propensity of society for arbitrary oppression. The film closes with the boy bearing a stone he plans to throw at the usurper: he relents the moment he hears the instrument, while the girl runs along to join in playing even though the man cannot play. Eventually, the boy has his accordion back, and the music he produces is beautiful. No doubt Iranian cinema has managed since the 1990s to demonstrate the ability to deploy real-life characters and non-professional actors to convincing effect. This is precisely what Panahi manages to do in Accordion, even though the film is not as intellectually stunning as it might be and may even be predictable in parts. To Panahi's credit, however, the film manages with extreme economy of means to present an effective picture of the limitations of life in a closed society. *** Freedom is undoubtedly a principal purpose of art. It takes on different guises with different directors. While Accordion is based on an extremely simple idea which it carries out in eight minutes, the Syrian film Rodage (Taming) written and directed by Nidal Aldibs - which was screened in the course of the official competition - presents notions of freedom and fear in a somewhat more complicated way in 100 minutes. The word rodage, taken from French, is a reference to easing the car motor into action when it is new. According to Aldibs, the film was originally entitled Dance of the Eagle but that in the course of shooting he found Rodage more expressive of the point of the film. The principal point of the film is to portray the conflict between the freedom to love and fear of authority. It is the story of a mechanic named Jihad, who is in love with a girl named Nawal, but because of his fear of her brother, who works in the police, Jihad represses his love. The brother never appears in the film, emphasising the fact that the fear emanates from within. The first - and only - plot turn occurs when Jihad takes Nawal out on a desert cruise in a jeep he had been fixing; the car ends up overturned and the two lovers are injured. Consciously or unconsciously Jihad moves away from the site of the accident, leaving his girlfriend alone in the desert. He is saved by the Bedouin; and when he returns he suspects she was saved by a former army officer man named Mahmoud who lives as a recluse in an outhouse of a disused petrol station. Somehow Mahmoud has managed to retrieve the jeep. Jihad's troubled conscience prevents him from telling the story to his colleague at the mechanics' or to Mahmoud. Eventually the script plateaus to a dual situation in which Jihad flees in fear of Nawal's brother while at the same time attempting to find out where she is from Mahmoud. The film develops into a philosophical dialogue about love, the ability to manage an emotional relationship, and fear of authority in its many forms. These ideas were presented in many films many decades ago, and perhaps specifically in Syrian films over the last 30 years; nor is Aldibs's mode of presentation particularly innovative or interesting. It is in fact more or less poor in form and structure. The narrative never develops: the dialogue is simply repeated over and over and more or less the same way, as if the script writer could not imagine what two people like Mahmoud and Jihad could do or say in such a remote place. Directorial creativity came to an end within the first half hour; and even the abstract ideas the director is eager to stress in the course of the film seemed largely disjointed and badly coordinated. Symbolist cinema, which is globally extinct, lives on remarkably in this film. *** War is a horrible and extremely cruel thing to watch on news channels, but not so in the context of audiovisual fiction. This is what gives war films their appeal. The situation is even more powerful in the case of civil war, which takes place in the cities and involves interesting drama. In this case we are not so much before two aries as before a society gone haywire, a society filled with hate and bearing arms. Still, civil war is not an easy subject to depict, and it requires of any director a high degree of intellectual depth and a genuine understanding of the social, political and cultural circumstances informing an armed conflict between members of the same society. Where the director is not sufficiently immersed in the specificity of the issue at hand, where the least detail is treated superficially, an error of understanding occur that result in countless mistakes. This is precisely what happened to the Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve who on reading a play by a Lebanese- Candian writer named Wajdi Mouawad decided to make an eponymous film based on it about the Lebanese Civil War, Incendies, another official competition feature. Regardless of the merit of the play itself, Villeneuve clearly does not have enough understanding of the Lebanese Civil War, which provided fertile ground for numerous films of various qualities in and outside Lebanon, with some 90 percent of Lebanese films one way or another connected to it. Incendies tells the story of the twins Jeanne and Simone, Canadians of Middle Eastern extraction. Throughout the film the director refrains from mentioning place names, but it is clear that the boy and the girl are of Lebanese Christian origin. When their mother Nawal dies they are distressed to discover that, out of anger with the world, her will dictates that she should be buried in a most humiliating way; she will have a proper funeral only if the twins agree to travel to their country of origin to find their father - hitherto thought dead - and a brother they have never heard of. The film turns into a treasure hunt whose object is to solve the puzzle of who the father and the brother are. Villeneuve falls into the trap of infatuation with the abstract idea of civil war and, failing to take account of its reality, he veers off into a form of epic tragedy that rings, ultimately, hollow. Among the many pitfalls of the film, for example, is that different actors, though supposedly all Lebanese, speak different dialects of Arabic. The film operates on the principal of a detective story or a mystery. It moves between two time frames as it does so. First there is the mother's youth at the outbreak of war, when her Christian family murders her Palestinian boyfriend. She gives birth to ason by the Palestinian, whom she is forced to leave at an orphanage, and is cast out of the family. Then there is the time in which Jeanne starts to look for answers to the questions that have troubled her since she read the will, while Simone remains unconcerned. The first line of action progresses, touching on such Civil War events as identity killings, which Nawal witnesses on her way south to look for her son, saved only by the cross she is wearing. Later on Nawal is enlisted in the militia of a man named Shamseddin and soon carries out an assassination very like Soha Beshara's attempt to assassinate Anton Lahd in 1988. She too is placed in the Khiyam detention camp and tortured but unlike Soha Beshara Nawal is raped in prison and gives birth to the twins; later on Shamseddin helps her to flee Lebanon to America and then Canada. In a strangely Oedipal twist it eventually turns out that the man who raped her is in fact her son by the Palestinian, who was kidnaped and enlisted on the side of the Christians in the meantime. By then the drama seems like a string of implausible falsifications with far too many coincidences imposed. The ultimate effect is cheap melodrama despite the masterful suspense and visual thrill of the way it is presented. *** Cirkus Colombia by Danis Tanovic, another official competition entry, is the exact opposite. It tells a simple story that can happen anywhere at any time but happens to happen in the 1990s before the civil war in the Balkans. It is another example of a civil war that exhausted not only the former Yugoslavia but all of Europe and was as major as the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Nothing is made up or borrowed from history. This is rather an ordinary story in extraordinary times. Tanovic, who received the best foreign film Oscar and the Cannes's best screenplay in 2002, opens his film with Lucija and her son Martin who live in a large city house in Herzegovina, registering daily-life details of the mother-son relationship. Martin is 20, and his hobby is walkie-talkie. When his mother's boyfriend, an army officer, gives him good enough radio equipment, his dream of making contact with America comes true. The drama starts with the return of Divko, Martin's father, who left 20 years ago to Germany. There he has managed to make a lot of money and acquire an extremely attractive young girlfriend. He returns to settle down in the city with two objectives: to show off his wealth and his girlfriend and take revenge on his former wife who refused to travel with him. He soon abuses his former connection with a high official to evict her from the house - where he moves in with his girlfriend. Martin sneaks back to the house to practise his hobby, but the drama takes a major turn when a relationship develops between him and his father's girlfriend, after Divko's obsession with revenge goes out of hand. War breaks out in Yugoslavia, and in this city where the police are Croats and the army Serbians conflict is unavoidable. Lucija's boyfriend persuades her that they should flee together with Martin, whom he considers a son; everyone flees, including Divko's girlfriend, but Lucija returns for the final scene which shows her and Divko on a swing while, in the background, the city is being bombed.
