Interview: Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts on 'For Sama'

by Murtada Elfadl

For Sama, the new documentary in theaters that chronicles the five years of the Syrian uprising in Aleppo, is presented as a document from a mother trying to explain what happened to her newborn daughter. Yet what filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab shows through capturing the minutiae of everyday life in a city under siege and continuous bombardment, is a love letter to people committed to building a better society even as the situation around them becomes dangerous. Al-Kateab, a journalist, and her husband Hamza, a doctor, make the choice several times to stay in Aleppo and continue their work while starting a family, building a life, helping their community, hoping they can sustain despite the circumstances. The film presents a narrative rarely seen on screen, intimately documenting life from inside a city ravaged by war, as its people are just trying to live through the days. We recently spoke to Al-Kateab and her British co-director Edward Watts in New York. (This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Murtada Elfadl: How did you come to work together?

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Doc Corner: 'Honeyland'

By Glenn Dunks

You know a movie is going to give you something when within the first two minutes, it makes you bolt upright and exclaim “Oh wow!” to an empty room. The eyes pop and the eyebrows raise as you marvel at the sheer unexpectedness of what is on screen. In Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s Honeyland, the image in question is that of an aging beekeeper straddling precariously along a cliff-face to a hive hidden among the rocks. Surrounded by grey and brown, Hatidze Mutatova (who I assume is in her 50s?) reveals a wedge of golden honeycomb. The gold in the rocks.

It’s a startling way to open a film from a purely logistical standpoint. It’s also a visual that really clues the viewer into its subject's tenacity and sheer force of nature abilities as a cultivator and protector of bees – an animal, after all, that is vital to the existence on Earth of everyone from those of us in major metropolises to those, like Hatidze, in isolated, wind-swept, mountainous regions of Macedonia...

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Soundtracking: Southland Tales

by Chris Feil

Recently resurfacing with repertory runs of its original catastrophic Cannes cut, Richard Kelly’s notorious Donnie Darko follow-up Southland Tales plays like the most bizarre time capsule. It captures not only a specific ideological moment in the timeline of post-9/11 anti-Bush anxieties, but it also captures the aura of MTV in its dying days as a culturally dominant force. For the uninitiated: imagine a Nashville porn parody peppered with internet conspiracy theories and set to the Pixies, then edited for television. It doesn’t all work by a long shot but it’s kind of awe-inspiringly out there, and at its best when it realized that it’s really meant to be an opera.

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The Ophir Nominations. Which film will be Israel's Oscar Submission?

by Nathaniel R

The Ophir Awards, honoring the best in Israeli cinema, were created in 1990. The winner of Best Film always becomes Israel's Oscar submission. Well, almost always. There have been a few exceptions due to eligibility issues --  the most famous example being The Band's Visit (2008) which was hugely successful in US arthouses (and eventually became a Tony-winning Broadway musical) but which could not be submitted because the Israeli and Egyptian characters spoke in English too often due to their language barriers.

After the jump, the nominations for this year's Ophirs  NOW UPDATED WITH THE WINNERS (thank you to longtime reader Yonatan for the hat tip!) and more about Israel's Oscar history...

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"Kathy Griffin: One Hell of a Story" and "The Great Hack"

by Eurocheese

Kathy Griffin: A Hell of a Story’s one night only theatrical event (Wednesday, July 31st) and Netflix’s disturbing expose on digital exploitation The Great Hack couldn’t be more different in tone, but they would make an interesting double feature. I couldn’t have imagined either film would exist just a few years ago. In a decade, I wonder what we’ll be saying about both of them...

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