Unlocking Doors of Cinema (Fath Abwab As-sinima)
Nezar Andary | 2019 | Lebanon | 61
‘Unlocking Doors of Cinema’ explores fifty years of artistic output by the daring Syrian auteur Muhammad Malas. An exile from his home town of Quneitra Malas dwells on the themes of loss, memory, and home. From the 1967 War and Palestinian Camps in Beirut, to the songs of Aleppo, and the political tragedies of Syria, Malas exemplifies what it means to be an auteur and public intellectual. ‘Unlocking Doors of Cinema’ takes you on a unique cinematic journey that is a visual conversation with the auteur’s own five decades of work.
Producer: Hana Makki
Director Biography
Nezar Andary grew up all over the Arab world after leaving Lebanon during the Civil War. He received his bachelors from Columbia University, and his PhD from UCLA. An Associate Professor at Zayed University, Andary has over the last four years produced over 10 documentary shorts for Arab Film Studio that have screened in over 50 festivals. Andary is the artistic director of the Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival, the first of its kind in the Arab World. He is the co-editor of a book series, ‘Focus on Arab Cinema’ for Palgrave MacMillan, and has recently published a book entitled ‘Cinema of Muhammad Malas: Visions of a Syrian Auteur’. Andary’s first feature documentary entitled ‘Unlocking Doors of Cinema’ pays respect to a well known film auteur and his fundamental passion for cinema.
Director Statement
The films, writings, and life of Muhammad Malas are a testament to the heroism of persistence and expression. Even though they reflect an existential melancholia and yearning for what has been lost he is not a victim.
Since the early 1970 Malas’s cinema has spread around the world to film festivals, television, schools, libraries and bookstores. Now, ‘Unlocking Doors of Cinema’, presents his work and life in a cinematic vision that I developed while writing the book, ‘Cinema of Muhammad Malas’. The documentary replicates aesthetic ideas of mise-en-scene and cinematography to reveal Malas’s creative work and confront Malas’s 50 years of filmmaking in Syria and the Arab world.
This feature documentary develops a greater understanding of his achievements as a filmmaker and intellectual from a country that, to most, has become a metaphor for war, refugees, and geo-political conflict. What has happened in Syria is a disaster beyond comprehension.
Yet this disaster of Syria is not a simple theoretical or aesthetic construct. The mere mention of Syria and an understanding of its present status is a starting point that requires a cinematic and humanist approach to contextualise historical and cultural realities, to search for truth between the cinema of the past and the values that Muhammad Malas still embodies to this day.
