Salata Baladi

Salata Baladi ســلطة بـلدي

Screening on Thursday, April 24, 2008
Venue: Cochin Media School, near South Over Bridge, Ernakulam.
Time: 6.15 p.m.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAFJU2pkKTU

Golden Conch award for best Long Documentary - Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) 2008, Special Prize from the International Critics Jury Fipresci - MIFF 2008- 'Outstanding Documentary' Noor Award at the The Arab Film Festival San Francisco.

Synopsis
21st century Egypt, spurred by the rallying cries of a global clash of civilizations, risks drowning in a xenophobic frenzy. Mary, a grandmother, and her daughter (the filmmaker) join efforts to give Mary's grandson, Nabeel, a glimpse into possible alternatives: the family's 100-year history of mixed marriages. Like many Egyptians, after a century sprinkled with multiple immigrations, a few conversions and a few mixed marriages, Nabeel is a mix of Egyptian, Italian, Palestinian and Lebanese with some Russian, Caucasian, Turk and Spanish; from his Moslem, Christian and Jewish descendants he inherits a track record embracing Socialism, Fascism, Communism, Nationalism, Feminism and Pacifism.

But as the grandmother weaves her way through the family fairy tales, she bumps into her own fears and the continued silence shrouding one branch of the family grows distressingly louder. In an act of solidarity with the Palestinian people dispossessed by the creation of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948, Mary has been boycotting her Egyptian Jewish family in Israel for 55 long years. Inspired by the telling of her own stories and the fresh perspectives her 10-year-old grandson brings to them, she and her loving, eclectic circle engage in the breaking of arguably one of the most vicious taboos in modern Egypt.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE
"It struck me that our history is contained in the homes we live in, that we are shaped by the ability of these simple structures to resist being defiled." (Achmat Dangor, Kafka's Curse).

The original inspiration for this film was simple enough: a love for my family's stories and a wish to share them. It was a story telling project. The energy that eventually propelled me into this adventure was more complicated. I saw my octogenarian mother aging and my 10-year-old nephew growing up under a shadow of satellite dishes and a rising clamor about some inevitable clash of civilizations. And a mixture of hope and fear overtook me. My mother's stories, woven across the 20th century, confound any straightforward understanding of the historical events during which they were played out and are almost always an exception to the reductive homogeneity with which we are taught to view 'History.'

In my family, religions and cultures get married when they appear to be divorcing in the global arena. In a world where my family's identities are being squeezed into irreconcilable positions, I needed to document my history before I became apologetic about it and the myth of its extinction was realized. But as my mother told her stories, I discovered that the film could not simply be a reclaiming of our treasured past: we found ourselves colliding with pockets of denial and silence. Without confronting the taboos of our present, my mother's stories were reduced to self indulgence and nostalgia. And so my story telling film became a witness to a new story still in the making -- a story about my family's efforts to once more climb the wall that unjustly insists on separating our principles from our humanity.