First Impressions: Thinking Aloud About Film

I join up with Dr. Fiona Cox aka Kitty Mazinsky, for wide-ranging discussion of Francis Lee's fascinating film

We return to Chadi Abdel Salam's Al-Momia/ The Night of Counting the Years to get an Egyptian perspective on the great and beautiful film. The timing is perfect too as the next day the mummies of the kings were moved to a new home for the first time since the events depicted in the film.

Hussein returns to offer us a fascinating Egyptian perspective on the career of Youssef Chahine beginning with Cairo as Seen By Chahine (1991) and talking us through The Emigrant (94), Destiny, The Other (99). We also touch on The Choice (1970), Silence, on tourne! (2001).

At the request of our listeners, we are expanding the podcast onto other instances of Egyptian cinema. We saw Shadi Abdel Salam's Al-mummia/ The Night of Counting The Years in the wonderful version restored with the help of Martin Scorsese and the Cineteca di Bologna. It's a truly great film: poetic, allegorical, about the past and the nation, people robbed, robbing others, robbing themselves, stealing their own past and rescuing it. But not without a cost. A very beautiful film that I'm sure will reward further viewing. Much of this podcast is a combination of appreciation and queries about what we don't yet understand.

We return for the third part of our conversation with Hussein, offering an Egyptian perspective on his career and its contexts and significance. In this episode we touch on 'The Sparrow', 'The Return of the Prodigal Son', 'Adieu Bonaparte' and 'Alexandria...Again and Forever'. We will return for a final episode discussing the last stage of Chahine's brilliant career beginning with 'Cario as Seen by Chahine'.

A conversation with scholar Misha Iakovlev on the fascinating Norwegian television show, originally aimed at young girls, that has elicited fervent fan following from different countries and for different reasons. Released across various platforms and edited together to broadcast, it's a fascinating example of queer transnational transmedial television that offers us a lot to discuss and much else to think about some more.

We continue our discussion of the Iranian programming at the Wales One World Film Festival with Bahram Beyzaie's great, Downpour: influenced by Italian Neo-realism and European Art Cinema, one of the films that spearheaded the Iranian New Wave counter cinema, poetic and critical, and managing to synthesise realism and allegory. A great film. The full post can be found here: https://notesonfilm1.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=17426&action=edit&calypsoify=1

We continue our discussion with Hussein, to garner an Egyptian perspective on the career of Youssef Chahine to 1985. We touch on Nile Boy, Blazing Sun, 'The Turn of the Decade' films (Forever Love, In Your Hands, Lover's Code, A Man in My Life. We discuss how some phrases from his films have become common parlance in Egyptian culture. We touch on the complicated relationship with Mohsen Mohieddin and we end with Dalida and The Sixth Day. It's a conversation still to be continued.

We continue with our exploration of the Iranian Cinema on offer at the Wales One World festival with a discussion of the extraordinary The Deer, a metaphor for pre-revolutionary Iran's social relations, focussing on down and outs living in a courtyard with a heroin addict and a bank robber as heroes. The influence of Italian neo-realism is everywhere present in a film that is simultaneously symbolic but also pulpy and visceral. It's an iconic film extra-textually as well: a cinema showing the film was burned down killing hundreds of people. It's a film that is still banned in Iran.

A discussion of Filmfarsi, a film by Ehsan Khoshbakht, of a mode of filmmaking extremely popular in Iran -- urban gangster films, melodramas, musicals -- set in urban working class milieus, that evoked and challenged the country's vaunted leap in modernity. It's a cinema quickly banned after the '79 revolution, and a cult on VHS. The filmmaker shows the wide range of filmmaking, its transnational perspective, its ritual and fetishistic post -79 consumption, and well evokes why it was so powerful, why it's been banned and why it is so cherished.