Malas’s two features establish him as an auteur, and the same can be said of Ousamma Mohammad, who has also racked up just two features since starting in the ’80s. (The wheels of Syria’s National Film Organization grind slow.) Both attack patriarchy; both remain under a de facto ban in their native country. The central incident of STARS IN BROAD DAYLIGHT (1988; September 29, 7:45 pm), the not-to-miss entry in the series, is an aborted double wedding, through and around which flow, in a continuous stream, absurdist details that expose the corruption and hypocrisy of the families involved. The original tone of this brisk, intense, hilarious film comes from its combination of furious energy and great visual imagination (Mohammad makes extraordinary use of mirrors and, in the wedding sequence, a TV monitor) with an elliptical narrative style and bitter and dry humor.
Mohammad’s second film, SACRIFICES (2002; September 23, noon), reveals some of the same qualities but is more puzzling and more ponderous. A broad-brush, one-shot/one-idea work that sometimes suggests a Grotowski-ish or Artaud-ish avant-garde theater piece shot by an admirer of Tarkovsky and Sergei Paradjanov, the film showcases the frenzied overacting of some not-very-accomplished players. (More blinking, twitching, and gibbering in close-up is on display here than any film should have.) Its most arresting scene comes late: a uniformed war veteran, face blackened with mud, returns home and forces his young sons to drink oil.
Abdullatif Abdul-Hamid, who plays the main villain in Stars in Broad Daylight, has directed several films, two of which are in the series. VERBAL LETTERS (1991; September 9, 1:45 pm) starts as a regionalized reworking of Cyrano de Bergerac, as cloddish Ismail gets his more normal friend, Ghassan, to propose to a lovely neighbor on Ismail’s behalf, but the woman prefers Ghassan. This situation devolves into an unfunny mish-mash of repetitious, grotesque, and absurdist elements. Similar in some ways but far better is AT OUR LISTENERS’ REQUEST (2003; September 24, 4 pm). Every Tuesday the residents of a small village gather under a large tree on the property of a benevolent landowner to listen to their favorite music show, which the government broadcasters sometimes pre-empt to report on the war with Israel and the US moon landing. Although tinged with irony, the early scenes are expansive, lyrical, utopian, with graceful camera movements that pay tribute to the landscape. With the departure of the landowner’s son for military service, the mood darkens. At Our Listeners’ Request is a strangely shaded variation on the kind of smooth simulacrum of unanimity that Soviet cinema once dealt in.
In Nidal Al-Dibs’s debut feature, UNDER THE CEILING (2004; September 16, 3:45 pm), a middle-aged videographer and his best friend’s young widow talk through the pain and emptiness left by the death of the firebrand writer who dominated both their lives. The dour, mournful tone is unremitting, and Al-Dibs’s gliding tracking shots come to seem phony and boring, failing to impose an interesting rhythm on the desultory, fragmented narrative. More successful is Ryad Chaia’s AL-LAJAT (1996; September 21, 4:15 pm). Set in a Druse village, the film shows the traditions of patriarchy taking their toll on successive generations of women. A woman recounts to her niece how her brother’s opposition once prevented her from marrying. The niece escapes from her stifling household into a marriage that proves just as unfulfilling, then tries for a new start with a teacher who falls in love with her. Chaia’s film accumulates handsome, static compositions and cavities to put the actors in; the performances are slow, deliberate. Chaia spells nothing out: his aversion to a straight narrative line (an antipathy he shares with Mohammad and Malas) is also, no doubt, a subversion — a word that could sum up this whole series.
