to reject fictional cinema, and his first (student) film was a documentary report on street protestors. Upon his return to Syria, Amiralay was hired to direct documentaries for the National Film Organization, but when his second and third films were banned by the Censor Board, he ceased working for the state and became an independent filmmaker.
To date, only Amiralay’s first film has been screened publicly in Syria. Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970) documents the Ba‘th Party’s modernization project, comparable to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Aswan project in Egypt, to construct a series of dams across major Syrian rivers in order to facilitate water distribution (especially irrigation) and provide rural areas with electricity. The flooding of ancient, low-lying villages and the resettlement of their inhabitants onto higher ground are depicted affirmatively, in the style of Soviet visionary Dziga Vertov. Amiralay’s subsequent documentaries deploy techniques more akin to socialist realism—toward much different ends. Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974) and The Chickens (1977) critique the detrimental effects of industrial modernization on the peasantry.
Realizing that alternative exhibition venues would be necessary for this kind of filmmaking, Amiralay helped found the Damascus Cinema Club along with Mohammad Malas, with whom he and Oussama Mohammad would later codirect Shadows and Light, the Last of the Pioneers: Nazih Shahbandar (1994), a documentary homage to the pioneer of Syrian cinema that is also an ode to filmmakers who have suffered from censorship. The trio then made Moudaress (1996), a documentary about the poet, novelist, and painter Fateh al-Moudaress, former secretary-general of the Syrian Syndicate for the Visual Arts.
After government suppression increased in Syria following the 1979 Camp David Accords, Amiralay went into exile in France, directing documentaries for television about sociopolitical conditions and events in Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine–Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Amiralay first returned to Syria in 1991, yet he was equally at home in Beirut and Damascus and carries dual nationality. His Lebanese films include On a Day of Ordinary Violence, My Friend Michel Seurat . . . (1996), which concerns the abduction of a French sociologist who died in captivity during the so-called Western hostage crisis in the 1980s, and The Man with the Golden Soles (2000), which critically pursues charismatic former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, who spearheaded the reconstruction projects of postwar Lebanon, and whose assassination in 2005 radically affected the political landscape of Lebanon and precipitated renewed violence.
Returning to Syria, seemingly with the goal of establishing an Arab film school in cooperation with Denmark, Amiralay directed a “corrective” to Film-Essay entitled A Flood in Baath Country (2003), in which the devastating effects of the Euphrates Dam project on the small village of Al-Mashi are exposed through interviews with villagers and state functionaries, juxtaposed to reveal as dissimulation the government propaganda that has continued to laud rural industrial development. Although Flood was also banned in Syria, pirated DVDs have, according to Amiralay, been distributed widely throughout the country.
ANIMATION
Animated film is widely made and appreciated in the Middle East, though the vast majority of such work is not well known outside the region, partly because of a dearth, until very recently, of scholarly analysis and of training opportunities. In Iran, the art of animation cinema started during the late 1950s through the efforts of Esfandiar Ahmadieh, who made the first Iranian animated film, the very short experimental Molla Nasreddin (1957), and graphic artist and animator Noureddin Zarrinkelk, who founded the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, along with graphic designer Morteza Momayez and illustrators, designers, and artists such as Farshid Mesghali and Ali Akbar Sadeghi. The first Tehran International Animation Festival screened 488 animation titles, both domestic and international, while the second festival (2001) saw 35 foreign countries submitting their films for screening in addition to Iranian entries. Renowned Iranian animators include Abdollah Alimorad, Abolfazl Razani, Akbar Alemi, Ebrahim Forouzesh, Saeed Tavakkolian, and Nahid Shamsdoost. Animation films and animators are well supported by the Iranian government, which backs courses in various animation styles and techniques such as silhouette animation, Claymation, puppetry and stop-motion, watercolor, and yarn objects at major universities, including Tehran University, Arts University, Islamic Azad University, and the Islamic School of Cinema. The Little World of Bahador (Alimorad, 2000) invests animation with political allegory through the story of a group of brave mice, under the leadership of Bahador, who depose a cruel and tyrannical king to secure their freedom. The exilic Iranian graphic artist Marjane Satrapi’s graphic-novel-turned-animated-feature Persepolis (2007), a French coproduction, was initially banned in Iran due to its alleged misrepresentation of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The government subsequently relented, and the film has had limited screenings in Tehran, with scenes with sexual content deleted. The film’s fame has not been mirrored by other Iranian animations, but one noteworthy recent title is Kainoush Dalvand’s feature Battle of Kings (2012), which tells the story of Rostam and Sohrab, one of the most famous episodes of the Shahnameh.
Early instances of Turkish animation include Cemal Nadir Güler’s attempt to animate his character Amca Bey (“Mr. Uncle”) during the 1940s, a short animation film made in a student workshop academy organized by Vedat Ar at the Istanbul State Fine Art School, and the animated feature Once Upon a Time (Yüksel or Yalçın Ünsal, 1951)—purportedly completed, but its only print lost when sent to the United States for postproduction. Turkish animation began regular production during the 1960s, largely at Vedat Ar’s Filmar studio, which created animated commercials for various companies as well as cultural productions about famous Turks and Turkish historical figures for banks. Animation became a category at the Hisar Short Film Festival in 1970, and important animations of the period include Censor (Tan Oral, 1969), which criticized the censorship of art, and How the Ship of Creed Sailed (Tonguç Yaşar, 1969), an attempt at animating Ottoman calligraphy. The first animation department in Turkey was opened in 1984 at Eskişehir Anadolu University. Since the 1980s, Turkish State Television (TRT) and the Ministry of Culture have supported animation productions, especially those intended for children. In 2008, the first local children’s television channel, TRT Çocuk, was founded by TRT, and the channel started supporting various local animation series, including Pepee (Özhan Oda, 2008‒2015) and Rafadan Tayfa (2014–). A new regulation in 2011 also forced the international children’s channels operating in Turkey to air at least 20 percent locally produced content. Such developments have created a steep rise in the animation sector, and since 2009 feature-length animation films have also been released regularly in film theaters, including RGG Ayas (Düşyeri Animation Studios, 2014), Bad Cat (Mehmet Kurtulus/Ayse Ünal, 2016), and a feature-length film version of Rafadan Tayfa (Ismail Fidan, 2013).
The history of Egyptian animation begins with the films of the Frenkel brothers, Salomon, David, and Herschel, whose protagonist, Mish-Mish Effendi, was introduced in Nothing to Do (1936) and appeared in several sequels. In 1960, Ali Muhib and his brother, Husam, started an animation section within the Egyptian national television channel, and in 1962, Ali Muhib directed The White Line, which mixes animation and live action; he later directed the first Arab animation film series, Mishgias Sawah (1979), which ran for 30 episodes. Noshi Iskandar, a caricaturist, directed One and Five, a trilogy of films on the Six-Day War and the Defeat; Is It True?, Abd and Al, and Question (all 1969); and Excellent (1975), a critique of corruption. Other important figures are Ihab Shaker (The Flower and the Bottle [1968]); Radhà Djubran (Story of a Brat [1985]; The Lazy Sparrow [1991]); Abdellaim Zaki, who directed a considerable number of animated commercials; Mohamed Ghazala, also an educator and historian of the subject (Carnival [2001]; Crazy Works [2002]; HM [2005]); and two women, CalArts-trained Mona Abou El Nasr
