Marlowe Drive is an experimental film that explores the terrain of video games as a context for documentary filmmaking. A director, Adam Kesher, fresh from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, lands in another fictional Los Angeles. It's in this Hollywood movie landscape recreated by Rockstar Games that this director sets out to find someone to talk to. He's looking for a bridge between the real and imaginary worlds. The film takes place on the game's multiplayer platform to meet "real" characters. It gathers information on the individuals who inhabit this space and reinserts the process of documentary filming into a virtual world. Moving back and forth between staging and raw footage, the protagonist allows himself to be swept along by the current of a chaotic world that fascinates him but gradually overtakes him. Through his character and his encounters, we ourselves discover a virtual world. An autonomous world is strangely close to a form of reality.

A 1981 animated film about Howard, a mallard duck, who finds that he must depend on an unlikely coalition of animals when he misses his southbound flock and is forced to winter in New York City.

Based on the book Howard by James Stevenson

The Dupes by Tewfik Saleh tells the story of three Palestinian men of different generations who attempt to cross illegally from Iraq into Kuwait in a desperate search for employment. Adapted from the novella “Men in the Sun” by Palestinian writer and PFLP spokesperson Ghassan Kanafani, the film was released in 1972, the same year Kanafani was murdered by Israeli Mossad in a car bombing alongside his niece. Banned for decades due to its uncompromising portrayal of the treatment of Palestinian refugees in neighboring Arab countries, and newly restored, it is a staggering and unfortunately enduring adaptation of a timeless text - encapsulating the dangers of political inertia and suspension of time against an urgent struggle… and the trial by fire of migration in exile.

It tells the excruciating story of three Palestinian refugees from different generations who attempt to cross into Kuwait in a water tank in search of employment to alleviate the conditions of their lives and support their families. Saleh’s portrayal of the Palestinians’ harrowing journey illuminates the myriad effects of the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 on the livelihoods of Palestinians and its obstructions of their fundamental human rights and desires. The film was released in 1972; that same year, Kanafani was murdered with his niece by Mossad in a car bombing in Lebanon. The film itself was banned in Syria due to its criticism of various Arab regimes, which spelled the fate of the three characters as many Palestinians after them.

Today, the carousel of history remains in motion- aside from the blatant brutality by Israel, sanctioned by the US and other countries in the West, we are witnessing a similar inertia on behalf of Arab states. Protestors head to the Egyptian consulate to demand Egypt open the Rafah border and allow aid into Gaza amid fears of yet another mass displacement into Egypt.

Saleh’s The Dupes hardly deviates from Kanafani’s text, except for one crucial distinction at the end. In the novel, the final lines consist of the lorry driver shouting into the desert: why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? only to be answered by his own echo in the silence of the desert. Whether or not the refugees attempted to make a sound to alert the lorry driver is implicit. Saleh instead chose to show the three men banging on the door, their sounds drowned out by the drone of the AC. Saleh has said that he changed the ending as he wanted to depict the refugees resisting, counter to what he deemed Kanafani’s fatalism, or perhaps to remain more in line with the resistance movements of the 70’s..

On October 27, Israel cut off Internet and telecommunications in Gaza; videos and voice notes came out from people in Gaza asking - can they hear us? Does anyone see us? Despite feelings of helplessness, the most important thing to do is to listen and stay attuned to what is happening as Palestinians continue to resist despite the seemingly impassive silence of the desert around. The film negates the echo of the desert, imploring us to use our voices to respond and continue telling this story.

Text by Laila Qaddumi

Airtime is pleased to bring you IN THE AIR TONIGHT in partnership with LE CINÉMA CLUB as an encore to our screening event which took place September 20th, 2023.

Not the legendary fax story about Phil Collins, but another one. This urban legend teleports us to a night in '80s LA.

“An atmospheric standout of the Sundance and the New York Film Festival shorts programs, Andrew Norman Wilson’s IN THE AIR TONIGHT unfurls a ghost story beneath the night skies of Michael Mann’s Los Angeles. The film recounts the apocryphal tale behind Phil Collins’ 1980 superhit “In the Air Tonight,” which, legend has it, should be told aloud as the song builds to its climactic drum break.

Wry narrator Slipperman (voice actor David George) sets the scene: he’s accompanied Collins to Los Angeles for a jaunt through its cocaine-fueled nightlife. Slipperman’s hypnotic British baritone—which he admits is prone to mythmaking—gives a second life to Wilson’s assemblage of transitional shots from ’80s movies, including American Gigolo, 8 Million Ways to Die, and One from the Heart. A full moon rising, a fax machine, a notebook with “Not Hallucinating” scrawled in pen: all of these images lead Slipperman, and Collins, to a fateful swim in Malibu.”

-Excerpt text from Le Cinéma Club written by Chloe Lizotte

Anyab (Fangs) is Mohammed Shebl’s 1981 adaptation of Rocky Horror Picture Show.

A girl and her fiancé are on their way to a party on New Year’s Eve, but they get into an accident. Looking for help, they find nowhere to go except a strange castle. Their host for the evening is count Dracula, who instantly falls in love with the girl, wanting her for himself. The two lovers discover that Dracula is in Egypt in many forms. Anyab was the passion project of director Mohammed Shebl, and also a socio-economic commentary of the times in his country.

After my father died, the details of his life get lost in silence. My need to get to know him, uncovers a story marked by sexuality and political activism.

Jaime recorded everything, even his own death. From him, her daughter received more than one hundred hours of home videos and many uncertainties. Because as many people of his generation, Jaime was a clandestine person. But in his case, probably two times clandestine. The images recorded by Jaime, resignify to give place to questions around desire, sexuality, family and freedom. "Silence is a Falling Body" is the trip to a intimate and filial past, but also to a political one.

"For many years making this movie was for me a dilemma. How to tell your own story when it ́s also the story of others? Why to tell secrets,when for a long time there was so much effort in keeping them as they were and not precisely with guilt or pity? Why try to make others tell that that makes them so uncomfortable?
A few years ago when Argentina sanctioned a law allowing gay marriage, an activist said that that triumph was not only ours, because we walked over footsteps. Everyone in my movie, in my story, left a print . Together we built an net of affection and activism that i hope after watching "Silence is a Falling Body" keep printing out more footsteps to keep walking over." Agustina Comedi

"I was one of the lucky ones, I spent lockdown watching a film a day. I also started writing to my first penpal, Cecilia Estalles, a young queer woman in Buenos Aires who works for the Archivo de la Memoria Trans, an amazing archive of decades of photos of and by trans women in Argentina. Cecilia introduced me to the films of Agustina Comedi. Silence is a Falling Body is a tender, vulnerable homage of a film. Deceptively simple in form, it is first of all a home movie, but it transcends the normal description. It explores the notions of family, of love, of desire, and of activism. When her father died, suddenly Agustina discovered that he’d had an entire other life, that of a gay man. With Silence, she pays tribute to her beloved father and to his capacity to live out his range of desires. But it’s also a film about repression, about the persecution of the queer community in Argentina by the government and by the political leftist parties, who operated with their own form of homophobia. This film is a jewel in the canon of queer cinema."

-Nan Goldin

It all happened on a dark night. The Man was too tired to be a stranger, too tired to be insulted by others simply because he spoke Arabic with a wife who spoke French with their beloved mixed race son.
He looked at the sky and shouted. But that night, far in the cosmos, a voice answered. The Blue Star promised them a new world; safe and without fear. He starts to dream about escaping forever there...

«A night like this one, a man screamed, the man couldn’t stand being different, being the outsider. Far out in the universe, someone heard his call.» The film opens with the story of this desperate cry, as are, perhaps, all the cries of exile. The story of a «brown man» who dared to love a white woman. He speaks Arabic, his wife French, their distant voices intermingle, like a whisper, to tell us about their banished love. Valentin Noujaïm dives into his family’s archives to question the history of immigration in France, a country where his family has never been able to truly find its place. The film begins with images of a seemingly happy past - the birth of a forbidden love, a vacation by the sea... - but this happiness will soon turn to despair. The Lebanese man, exhausted by the rejection of his new country, implores the sky to show him a parallel universe. A promised land for those who do not find their place on earth. The family film thus becomes a fantastic story and a political tale of an unexpected color. A blue star.
Elena López Riera - Visions du Réel

It is an adaptation of Arkin's own short story, and stars his sons, Adam and Matthew. Matthew comes into the kitchen one afternoon and finds Adam hard at work creating some sort of frightening concoction. After waiting ten minutes for the potion to sit, Adam gets Matthew to be his test subject, and gets a surprising result.

People Soup (1969) was nominated for an Academy Award for live action short film in 1970.

The late Alan Arkin, a legendary actor who passed away in June at the age of 88, excelled in various fields such as acting, directing, writing, and improvisation. He was recognized with numerous accolades for his acting craft, including an Academy Award and multiple Tony awards. His notable directorial work in the 70s, particularly the film Little Murders, explores the absurdity of reality and is unmatched in its satirical brilliance.

Hello Asli; 

I’m touched that you have some affection for PEOPLE SOUP.  I’m happy to give you permission to show the film, but I’m not sure I have the rights to it.  I’m pretty sure I sold it to Columbia Pictures about a century ago.  In any case I cant imagine they would have any objection to your showing it if they even remember that they own it.  But if it’s my permission that you want,  you’ve got it. 

Best

Alan Arkin

Sent from my iPad

PEOPLE SOUP first existed as a story I wrote when I was in a hospital for a few days, and had nothing else to do.  I’d never written anything before, and didnt think I was a writer, particularly, but sent it out anyway, and it was bought by Galaxy Magazine. A friend of mine, who was a producer, read it and said it would make a film.  I’d never directed a film before, but thought if I financed it myself, I could learn something about film directing without costing anyone anything other than myself.  I had written the story with my younger brother and sister in mind, but it easily translated into my sons Adam and Matthew, who happily agreed to do it.  We commandeered a friends house in New Jersey, hired a really good cinematographer and a chicken wrangler, and that was that.  It was bought by Columbia Pictures and shown around the country to go along with a feature, and were lucky enough to get an Oscar nomination for best short.  .. And that was that.  

Sent from my iPad

Rough day for Beads Kew

Untitled is an investigation into an anecdote the artist heard about a house near Algiers: that it was abandoned by its wealthy owners during the political unrest in the 1990s and occupied by a terrorist group. The idyllic landscape we are shown is in fact a series of full-scale inkjet prints, which the artist photographed and used to wallpaper a life-size model of the house for his film set. Actors playing the landlord of the house, the gardener and the neighbors give conflicting accounts of what the terrorists had done there, how they lived, how they ate. More importantly, they question why the group chose to live in a house with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on all sides. This re-imagined scene is typical of Beloufa’s exploration of the hazy shades of narrative, make-believe and truth that underpin the representations of real-world events.