FILM FESTIVALS ETC.

LA being the entertainment industry capital that it is (the LA Times, for example, publishes TWO entertainment sections in its daily paper - entertainment is *business* just as much as pleasure here), movies and movie makers are as plentiful as lumber and lumberjacks in Oregon. Film festivals, movie revivals, advance showings, etc. happen almost weekly somewhere in town.

National Geographic has its own annual film festival called " All Roads Film Festival", which has been playing at the historic Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood since Thursday. I was mainly interested in two shorts produced by a Palestinian woman Jaqueline Salloum: "Planet of the Arabs" and "Arabs A-Go-Go" which showed Saturday afternoon.

Now, the Egyptian Theatre, as you would expect from its name, is built into what Hollywood might picture as an Egyptian Temple, with columns, scarabs, and hieroglyphs. The 1920's structure, just a block or so from Mann's Chinese Theatre, was saved from the wrecking ball a decade or so ago, and now serves as a very prestigious venue for "serious" film, all the kinds you won't find in your typical 14-theater cineplex.

After grabbing a cappuccino at a little place across the street (also a 20's-era mini complex of shops), I rushed to get there by the 4:30 start. Eight entries by women producers from various countries (they couldn't be US-made) were on the bill, including my two Arab shorts. The usual "artistic" types were hanging around with their required T-shirts and sneakers and dark glasses, but I rushed past them to get my ticket and grab a seat. Not a problem. Half the theater was empty, and the show got off to a late start about 4:50. The inside was state-of-the-art, with a modern screen and sound system inside the 80-year-old theater shell (still with its original scarabs and ankhs).

A very creative blend of animation and live pictures from South Africa, "Beyond Freedom", about 40-min. long, led the series. It was mainly snippets of interviews of a variety of South Africans - black, "coloured", and white - who gave their views on the benefits and problems after apartheid, mixed with a great South African music track.

The next two shorts (9 minutes and 2 minutes respectively) were by the Palestinian woman. They were supposed to show the narrow and paranoid view Hollywood has had of Arabs represented by movie clips going back decades contrasted with the representation of Arabs by Arabs in Arab movies themselves (usually from Egypt, the center of the Arabic media).

It was mainly disappointing. The first, "Planet of the Arabs", had no intro and its Hollywood movie clips were strung together one after the other without commentary. They were campy, yes, and violent, and the Arabs in them appeared bloodthirsty and fanatical with bad wardrobes borrowed from too many Nativity pageants. I guess it made its point, but what exactly was the point? And how could it not have included a clip of Rudolph Valentino, the original movie Arab in the "Sheik of Araby"? Hollywood stereotypes of Arabs have also been romantic and dashing as well as violent and ugly (where was "Lawrence of Arabia"). But I guess she thought she was preaching to the choir.

The second short, "Arabs A-Go-Go", was, apparently, to show how the Arab entertainment industry sees its own people, but most of those clips (again with no commentary) were from campy musicals from the 1950s and '60s when, ironically, the Middle East was twice as liberal socially as it is today. None of the woman covered their hair, miniskirts abounded, and fleshy belly dancers ruled. What, no Arab film has been made since 1967?

Applause was polite but not thunderous. The audience had been given survey sheets to rate each entry from a technical and cinematographical standpoint - and, to be frank, merely stringing clips from *other* people's films one after the other without any commentary, voice-over, subtitles, etc. is not that challenging technically. A first semester film student could have done as well.

But the other entries were better done, including an apparently traditional African tale from Zimbabwe set to film with song and dance. It was sort of a "family movie" but not very. It depicted a poor village family unit - father, mother, three children and baby - who were constantly fighting off starvation. The Zimbabwean twist to this Hansel and Gretel tale was that the bad, lazy father, instead of getting meat on the hoof for his family by his own effort, builds a pit trap and talks his wife into it (thereby impaling her on the stakes inside - graphically filmed for our edification). He then orders the children to help him carry the body back home, whereupon he sets about butchering it and cooking it up in a pot (which he then gets to eat by himself, leaving his starving children to ... well, starve). But don't worry; the cannibalism is not approved of in the tale. And Mom gets her revenge by making his stomach explode, and she is reunited with her children.

All in all, an interesting look into how other cultures see the world and what is worthy of making a film about - despite the disappointing Arab shorts.