I'm dashing this one off in a hurry; hopefully, I'll have more to say later in the weekend.
Let's start with some serious and disturbing news. Here's an Egyptian case that isn't getting any ink in the mainstream press, here or in Europe. Back in mid-August, one of the lawyers affiliated with the Egyptian National Democratic Party who is a specialist in Hesba cases (which claim be doing a service by eliminating what is harmful to Islamic society) against authors and artists demanded the flogging of an Egyptian female movie director and sent an official warning to the Sheikh of Azhar demanding the execution of such request. My source on this is the excellent Arabic Network for Human Rights Information. They wrote:
The Hesba lawyer offered the Sheikh of Azhar eight days to execute the flogging of the prominent Egyptian female movie director, Enas El-Dighaidy, eighty lashes because of a movie she directed called ¨Diaries of a Teenager Girl¨ claiming that the film defames Egypt.
It is worth mentioning that this same Hesba lawyer demanded, in one of his previous court cases, the cross-cutting of an Egyptian actress because she refrained from wearing a veil. He was also one of the lawyers who demanded to put Ibrahim Eissa, Chief Editor of Aldostour Newspaper, on trial in the case known as ¨the President’s Health Case."
ANHRI stated that Hesba has become a nightmare for authors and artists. Such Hesba cases could not have increased without the blessing of the government and cooperation with the Hesba lawyers. Such an attitude by the government allows for a heavy hand on brave journalists and bloggers who are still paying a high price for allowing us to enjoy a small margin of freedom of expression.
There are worse things than having your film edited or shelved.
For example, and a little closer to home, American documentary filmmaker Andrew Berends is still under arrest in Nigeria for alleged espionage. Berends and his interpreter Samuel George were arrested last Sunday. They were provisionally released for the weekend yesterday but are still "under arrest." For more information about the case, go to the blog that has been created by Berends supporters. If you haven't written to your Congressperson in support of Berends, there's no time like the present.
After a couple of items like that, it seems almost foolish to return to the ordinary film world, but movies go on being shown and it's up to the likes of your humble servant to sort the good, bad and ugly into their respective bins.
My fall film preview for JWeek is on-line here. You'll find an interview with the estimable Claude Miller, whose excellent new film A Secret opened yesterday, and a brief rumination on Amos Gitai's documentary work. And you'll find a list of other fall film offerings with Jewish themes here.
Although most DVD-oriented film fans are straining at the leash for the Murnau/Borzage at Fox box (yeah, I am too), I'm actually more excited by the Columbia Randy Scott/Budd Boetticher package, which features the best five films of that collaboration, all of them in the right aspect ration, etc, plus the usual extra material. Read it and weep for joy here. I am not exaggerating when I say that these are five of the best American films of the '50s. (Of course, I've been a Randy Scott fan since I was a wee tyke, lo these many years ago.) And for more on the Fox package, go here.
On the large screen, there are a couple of exciting retrospective programs in the offing in NYC this month. BAMCinemathek is hosting a 16-film Howard Hawks series, including some less-frequently screened items like Tiger Shark, Monkey Business and the painfully underrated The Big Sky. The series opens September 15, about the time that yours truly will be settling into the grind of NY Film Festival screenings (what a tough life). In the meantime, Anthology is offering a series of films by Vojtech Jasny, the regrettably neglected godfather of the Czech new wave, beginning with All My Good Countrymen on September 19.
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