Middle East Cinema Series Announces Spring 2015 Line-Up

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Nadi Cinema line-up for Spring 2015, sponsored by the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies

From Turkey to Palestine, Iran to India, Nadi Cinema introduces viewers to the storytelling and vision of filmmakers across North Africa and the Middle East. All films – classics, cult favorites, recent hits, comedies, tragedies, political thrillers, social commentaries, and romances, in black-white and living color – are subtitled in English. The series is hosted by professor Joel Gordon; screenings are free and open to the public.

All screenings take place in the Hembree Auditorium, room 107E in the Agricultural Food and Life Science Building (AFLS), next to the Pat Walker Health Center on Maple Avenue. Screenings begin at 7 p.m. and are free and open to the public.

• Jan. 28 – The new Spring 2015 season begins with The Kite (Lebanon 2003), directed by Randa Chahal Sabagh. Winner of the Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival, an absurdist tragicomedy about a Lebanese bride in love with an Israeli border guard.
• Feb. 11 – Turkish boy meets Kurdish girl and falls hard despite his father’s objections in director Seren Yuce’s Cogunluk/Majority (Turkey 2010). ‘A hard slap in the face,’ this film was widely viewed in Turkey and honored internationally.  ‘Love sometimes does not conquer all’ (Today’s Zaman).
• Feb. 25 – A controversial and highly-awarded animated film by director Ari Folman, an Israeli combat veteran interviews fellow soldiers in Waltz with Bashir (Israel 2008), seeking roots of recurrent nightmares from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut.
• Mar. 4 – A case of mistaken identity threatens national security when a Los Angeles expatriate lounge singer is invited to Iran as part of a cultural exchange. Director Saman Moghaddam’s Maxx (Iran 2005) is hailed as one of the most popular Iranian films of the last decade.
• Mar. 18 – An adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, director Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (India 2004) is set in Mumbai Muslim underworld and starring Irrfan Khan (Slumdog Millionaire, In Treatment, Life of Pi) in the title role.
• Apr. 8 – Thelma and Louise Egyptian style, director Muhammad Khan’s Dreams of Hind and Camelia (Egypt 1989) is a strikingly realistic tale of two maids who decide they've had enough. 
• Apr. 22 – Palestine's entry for the Academy Awards, set in the aftermath of the June 1967 war, director Annemarie Jacir’s When I Saw You (Palestine 2012) chronicles the efforts of a young Palestinian boy to cope with life in a refugee camp as the world around him is upended.

All seven film screenings are free and open to the public, and all are subtitled in English. Nadi Cinema is sponsored by the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

For film synopses, trailers and more information visit Nadi Cinema on the King Fahd Center webpage, or follow the Center on Facebook and Twitter.