Giona Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, came to Saudi Arabia for the first time to serve on the jury for the work-in-progress show in the Industry section of the Red Sea Film Festival, The Red Sea Market. As former president of Venice Critics Week, Nazzaro has been tracking Arab cinema for a while and programming images that break its mould. talk to me diverse About the challenges filmmakers from the region face trying new things.
My impression is that Arab directors these days are less committed to the authors’ vision of cinema. do you agree?
This is something that has been going on for some time. The truth is that there has been a huge paradigm shift within cinema from the Arab world and from the MENA region in general. This is largely because institutions like the Doha Film Institute have had the clarity and smarts to put a lot of interesting new talent on the map. One name that represents this is Aladdin Selim (“The Last of Us”), who is from Tunisia. But at the same time, in order to have a vision, Arab filmmakers are always pushed towards making something [Lebanese director] Ghassan Salhab calls the film “The Theme”. For example, a film like “La Rivière” (2021), Ghassan’s latest work – which in my opinion is very good – did not have the success of his previous film. [“The Valley”] Because there was no identifiable “problem” item to install it on.
What I now see as the main challenge for filmmakers in the region is that there is clearly a concrete need to express themselves in a way that does not force them to deal only and always with ‘issues’.
What do you think about imposing these narrative restrictions?
It must be emphasized that these limits are not necessarily imposed by the Arab countries themselves, but sometimes also by European expectations of what Arab film should be, which can be very limited. From my point of view, as director of the Locarno Film Festival, we always look forward to being surprised and going in an unexpected direction. Last year we showed the world for the first time in Piazza Grande the dark thriller “The Alleys” by Bassel Ghandour, a film that would have made [neorealist director] Giuseppe De Santis in Italy in the Fifties or Sixties by Pietro Germi. And I say this as a compliment. It’s quite a popular movie. But it’s also an anthology movie; It’s fun, but also tense. These are the names that need support in the region
Can you give me another example of an Arab film that transcends the limitations of the “theme”?
Certainly, when I was still at Venice Critics Week, I was presented with a film by an unknown Tunisian director named Abdelhamid Bouchnak. It was a horror movie called “Dachra” (2018), which we screened out of competition and recently released on a fantastic Blu-Ray release in the US “Dachra” [which is Tunisia’s first horror film] It opened the doors to the idea that horror films could also come from the so-called Arab world. As well as fantasy films, etc. You don’t always have to deal with poverty porn in order to understand yourself and that is probably the main turn-on.
I think if the assignment of Arab film editors and fund people is wise enough to support this new generation of filmmakers, we will have a lot of great surprises. Just think about [Tunisian serial killer drama] Black Medusa, directed by Youssef Chebbi and Ismail. It’s a small movie, but if you see what happens in “Black Medusa” it really tells you a story [current] Iranian revolution. There is a moment in the movie when it’s the female [killer] The protagonist gets turned on once he sees a cleric walking at night. Obviously there are “controversial” elements, but you can’t have art without being controversial.
What do you think of Saudi cinema?
Directors in Saudi Arabia, as is the case in Qatar, and in other countries in the region where cinema is new, are not as organized in their narratives as we would like them to be. When you open the door to the art of cinema, there are changes that are underway and that need to be worked on. I see that there is a strong need on the part of the Saudis to share stories, and this is something very important. We are only at the beginning and I can only hope that the Red Sea continues to support the strong positive energies that exist in this region.
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