Exhibition

Special Screening "Teta, Alf Marra" (Grandma, A Thousand Times)

Teta, Alf Marra (Grandma, A Thousand Times)

Special Screening

Sunday 30 October, 12.00, Bey Hamam

 

In the framework of the Main Programme of the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale, the multi-award-winning film of Mahmoud Kaabour “Teta, Alf Marra” (Grandma, A Thousand Times) will be screened at Bey Hamam, on Sunday 30 October, at 12.00 (noon).

 

From the award-winning director of “Being Osama” comes a poetic documentary that puts his feisty Beiruti grandmother at the center of brave film exercises designed to commemorate her many worlds before they are erased by the passage of time and her eventual death.

 

Teta Fatima is the 83-year old matriarch of the Kaabour family and the sharp-witted queen bee of an old Beiruti quarter. With great intimacy, the film documents her larger-than-life character as she struggles to cope with the silence of her once-buzzing house and imagines what awaits her beyond death. Meanwhile, her beloved violinist husband (deceased 20 years ago) is both an essential absence and presence. His features manifest through the face of their filmmaker grandson while his previously unpublished violin improvisations weave through her world and that of the film. Teta, Alf Marra brings together grandfather, grandmother, and grandson in a playful magic-realist documentary that aims to defy a past death and a future one.

 

The film scooped up the Audience Award for Best Documentary at its world premiere at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar and also honoured Mahmoud with a special jury mention for Best Arab Filmmaker. The film was also honoured with the Audience Award for Best International Documentary at Dox Box in Syria and recently won the Silver Gateway Award and cash prize of Rs 50,000 for The Best Film in the Celebrate Age category at the 13th Mumbai Film Festival.

 

 

Director’s Bio

Mahmoud Kaabouris a multi award-winning filmmaker, writer, and lecturer of Lebanese origin. He graduated with distinction from the Mel Oppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal, after which he pursued a documentary focus at the National Film Board of Canada and the newsroom at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His film "Being Osama", the documentary on the lives and times of six men sharing bin Laden’s first name in the post 9/11 world, received four international awards to date and was aired on twelve international channels. It also made him the youngest commissioned filmmaker in the history of Canadian television. Mahmoud is the founder and managing director of Veritas Films. His commercial work includes directing tailor-made documentaries for the UAE’s brass, including multiple films for The Ministry of Presidential Affairs and The Executive Affairs Authority in Abu Dhabi, not to mention Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, Dubai Investments, and Dubai Holding subsidiaries. His third feature-length film, already boasting one award, is slated for production in mid-2011. Additionally, Mahmoud provides media consultancy and curatorial services to various clients, as well as teaching master documentary classes to up-and-coming filmmakers across the Arabian Gulf region.

 

Sunday 30 October, 12.00 (noon)

Bey Hamam (Loutra o Paradisos)

Egnatia & Aristotelous, t. 2310 589141 & 143

Entrance is FREE