Three Short Films by Attiat Abnoudi & Queneitra My Love & The Leopard

In Wheeler Auditorium

Admission: $2.50

The program will begin with three short films:
Mud Horse, Sad Song Of Touha, and The Sandwich
Director Attiat Abnoudi in Person!
Attiat Abnoudi's The Mud Horse (1971, 12 mins) has been shown at dozens of film festivals and forums on women and film, Third World Cinema, etc. and has helped to establish Abnoudi as one of the leading independent film artists in the Arab world. After a showing this past April at the Third World Film Festival at UCLA, Linda Gross of the LA Times reported: “The Mud Horse is a strikingly photographed 12-minute film about life in Egypt, showing the harsh conditions and difficult life of the workers, mainly women and children, in a brick factory on the banks of the Nile. This sparse but powerful revolutionary statement by Attiat Abnoudi is the first film to be directed by a woman in Egypt, and has been banned in the filmmaker's country.” At presstime, we have no information on Abnoudi's two other films for this program, other than the running times: Sad Song Of Touha (12 mins) and The Sandwich (13 mins).

Followed by,
Queneitra My Love
Director Amin Bounni in Person!
A 30-minute documentary, with English titles, about the Syrian town which the Israelis took in the 1967 war, describing how the town looked when it was returned to Syria.

Discussion with filmmakers and critics, followed by
The Leopard
Director Nabil Maleh in Person!
After a 30-minute intermission/question period, Syrian director Nabil Maleh will present his feature The Leopard (1972, 90 mins, 35mm, English titles), which was a prize-winner at both the Karlovy Vary and Locarno Film Festivals. Nabil Maleh studied cinema in Czechoslovakia, and since 1963 has directed more than 60 shorts. In 1972, he made his first feature, The Leopard, which deals with the period following World War I when the Turks left and the French came in. The subject, shown from the point of view of one man, is the attitude of the people towards occupation, the consciousness that the end of one type of occupation does not mean freedom. His second feature, The Progressive Gentleman, was banned for almost three years before being released. Recently, he directed a feature based on a novel by the famous Syrian writer Hanna Mina entitled Photos.

This page may by only partially complete. For additional information about this film, view the original entry on our archived site.