Though I have seen but three of the nearly 40 features and documentaries that make up this year's Seattle Arab and Iranian Film Festival, I believe they are representative of not only the major themes of the festival itself but of Arab Americans, and Arabs and Americans in general. These are the films I have seen: a short media collage or mix called Planet of the Arabs, a long documentary called Forget Baghdad, and a feature film called Satin Rouge.
A part of the Framed! The Corporate Media at War section of the film festival, Planet of the Arabs is a collage of the dominant images of Arabs in Hollywood cinema. This is an area that has consumed the research and intelligence of Edward Said, a Palestinian-born philosopher who recently died after a long illness, and whose life and work is also the subject of a documentary in the Framed! series. Again and again, Said's books trace these representations in contemporary film and TV back to the birth of Europe's colonial project in the 18th century. Hollywood, however, has never been kind to any race, save the whitest of white males. At one time or another, and in varying degrees, poor whites, European immigrants, Asians, blacks, Hispanics, and women have been misrepresented or underrepresented by Hollywood. And each group has had to struggle long and hard to correct or improve the images Hollywood imposed on them.
For this reason, it is not surprising that there is a large section of the Arab community that is presently pushing to see on Hollywood screens characters that are recognizable and realistic. Planet of the Arabs mixes scenes from dumb movies like True Lies (James Cameron's worst effort) and Rambo III (the worst in a series that began brilliantly), and in each sequence we find the same Arab--the Arab who is obsessed with the destruction of the West and its values; the Arab who is fanatically religious. In a word, the Arab as the eternal terrorist.
No doubt, some Arabs are terrorists, but their terrorism is not innate or sourced from some strain in their language, or culture, or religion; it has been and still is shaped by real historical/social processes. Hollywood, of course, does not have the money or inclination to develop backgrounds to acts of terrorism; it simply wants bad guys that good guys can eliminate during explosive scenarios.
Co-presented with the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, the documentary Forget Baghdad concerns, by way of the lives of four intellectuals, the migration of Iraqi Jews from Baghdad to Israel shortly after the Second World War. Directed by Samir, the son of an Iraqi Communist, the documentary interviews the four men about their present lives as immigrants and their past involvement in Iraqi politics. All were Communists, all fought for a free and secular Iraq, all were nearly killed for their views and had to flee their country into the open arms of the then newly established state of Israel.
The transition for the Iraqi men was not easy, as they were by appearance and culture Arabs, though of the Jewish faith. And it is this contradiction that makes the documentary so rewarding. The very lives of these men collapses two myths along two opposed fronts. For the Jewish side, they explode the notion of Jewish unity, and expose the unceasing instability of such an identity; on the Arab side, they expose the fact that an adherence to Islam is not necessary for the construction of an Arab identity. The four men in the documentary have a profound love of their lost world, city, and the Arab language.
The Tunisian film Satin Rouge, which was released in America in 2002, is a beautiful film about an urban widow and her daughter. The mother is more traditional; the daughter is more modern. The daughter is learning belly dancing; the mother was once a master belly dancer. The core of the film concerns the sexual and mental liberation of the mother, which is facilitated not through a new West-based art form (like hiphop music or dancing), but an ancient and Arab-based medium: belly dancing.
The implications of this are rich and, as with the festival itself, offer fresh opportunities to reevaluate the meanings of such fixed and stubborn cultural points as past and present, feudalism and capitalism, backwards and progressive.
