Month: January 2020

Two documentaries offering a female perspective on the death and destruction in the war-torn Syrian cities of Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta received Oscar nominations for Best Documentary. Waad al-Kateab’s film “For Sama” and Feras Fayyad’s film “The Cave” document civilians’ struggle for survival in devastated cities where doctors in makeshift hospitals tend to throngs of injured and dying.  Amidst airstrikes, barrel bombs and chemical attacks, citizen journalist-turned-filmmaker al-Kateab chronicles her daily life in besieged Aleppo since the beginning of the rebellion against the Assad regime in 2012.”When I filmed everything you’ve seen in the film, I had no idea that I would do a film. So, I was just documenting all these moments because I was sure that I would be killed and I wanted this story not to be dead,” al-Kateab told VOA.”For Sama” is a visual diary dedicated to her daughter, Sama, born in the middle of destruction.Over five years in Aleppo, al-Kateab filmed thousands of hours of footage, recording her personal life as a young student, as a young bride living with her husband, Hamza, a doctor in Aleppo, and then as a mother.FILE – Director/producer/cinematographer Waad al-Kateab, left, and director Edward Watts participate in PBS’s “For Sama” panel at the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., July 30, 2019.While thousands of people who were looking for a better life abandoned the city, al-Kateab and her husband chose to stay, with Hamza working at a makeshift hospital where he was one of the few doctors left tending to injured civilians, mostly women and children.While airstrikes were hitting the hospital, al-Kateab kept filming the incoming casualties, holding the camera with one hand and her baby with the other. “I can’t really separate myself between Waad the mother and Waad the journalist. Everything I was trying to do was mixed between these two, and you can see that in the film,” she said.Filming everything around her served as a coping mechanism for al-Kateab. When she would feel hopeless as a mother, unable to give her daughter a better life, she would keep filming. And when she could no longer bear to film the horrors she witnessed, she would find solace in her baby daughter. She also drew hope that her footage would humanize the refugees on the world stage by showing how dangerous life is in Syria.”Behind every one of us, there is a story, there is a lot of memories, there is childhood and a lot of complicated decisions until they (we) reach this point. When people see the film, they can experience the same situation I went through,” al-Kateab said.After five years in Aleppo, ak-Kateab fled to London with her family in 2017. There, she collaborated with award-winning filmmaker and producer Edward Watts to make “For Sama.””It was incredibly challenging, trying to make this film,” Watts told VOA. “There were so many different stories. It was the story of Aleppo. The story of the hospital and their friends. It was the story of the whole conflict. And there was so much incredible footage. Trying to scope that, distill that down, while retaining its essence, retaining its spirit and doing justice to these guys’ lives was very hard.”‘The Cave'”The Cave” by Syrian filmmaker Fayyad is also an Oscar contender in the category of Best Documentary Feature. This is Fayyad’s second Oscar-nominated documentary on war-torn Syria.As in the film “For Sama,” Fayyad’s documentary chronicles Herculean efforts by a skeleton crew of doctors and nurses at an underground hospital called The Cave to save as many lives as possible from airstrikes by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and its allies in Eastern Ghouta. “The Cave” also chronicles the destruction through the eyes of a woman, the hospital’s head doctor, Dr. Amani Ballour, in a culture where, for women, wartime struggles are compounded by gender inequality.”A woman would be attacked if she turned to be a manager, and this is what happened with Dr. Amani. She managed to be a manager. She was the first manager in the history of Syria to lead a hospital,” Fayyad told VOA.FILE – Feras Fayyad arrives at the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, March 4, 2018.Fayyad also said that the film documents airstrikes by Russian warplanes and chemical attacks by the Assad regime on civilians, many of them children.He said both the Syrian government and its Russian allies have tried to discredit his film.”They called me a propaganda maker and the film a propaganda film,” Fayyad told VOA.Theodore Strzhizhovskiy, head of press, information and public relations of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, told VOA: “As for ‘The Cave,’ we do not closely follow Mr. Fayyad’s creative endeavors.”Fayyad, a Syrian exile living in Denmark, has been denied a visa to enter the United States to attend the Oscars.Members of the International Documentary Association wrote a letter to the U.S. State Department, requesting that Fayyad be given a visa to enter the U.S. and represent his film at the Oscars.When asked by VOA about the filmmaker’s case, the State Department responded in a statement: “The Department of State recognizes the important contributions international filmmakers and documentarians make to the culture of the United States. We strive to facilitate the legitimate travel of artists to the United States, regardless of nationality.”
 
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Rapper Eminem once again dropped a surprise album, releasing of “Music to be Murdered By” on Friday.The follow-up to 2018’s “Kamikaze” – also released without warning – was announced on Twitter just after midnight.The Detroit rapper also released a new music video for one of the 20 tracks on the album, “Darkness,” which depicts a shooting at a concert and includes footage of news broadcasts from recent mass shootings around the U.S. The video ends with an appeal to register to vote: “When will this end? When enough people care. Register to vote at vote.gov. Make your voice heard and help change gun laws in America.”The cover art features a bearded Eminem holding both a hatchet and a gun to his head, in apparent homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 album of the same name, Pitchfork  noted.Among many collaborators, the album features Ed Sheeran, Skylar Grey, Anderson .Paak and Juice WRLD, the 21-year-old rapper who died in December.
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For almost two years, a group of dedicated young women in a conservative neighborhood of Pakistan has been working to beat the odds and change the culture around them. The women are doing it by cycling. VOA’s Ayesha Tanzeem reports from Pakistan’s largest city Karachi
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Today she travels the world, attends a red-carpet movie premiere and sits on panels with astronauts, former presidents and feminist icons.But in the years after 9/11, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, center, sits at the Islamic Center of New York University during Friday prayers, Dec. 27, 2019. At 17, she and a group of friends started the blog Muslimgirl.com in response to anti-Muslim bullying they experienced after 9/11.A decade later, her She was 9 when the airliners struck the World Trade Center towers, and she remembers the warning of her Jordanian immigrant father: “They’re going to blame us.”In the aftermath, she was bullied. People threw eggs at her home and slashed her mother’s tires. Her family faced such a backlash that her father temporarily relocated them to Jordan.While she is proud of being “born and raised a Jersey girl,” it was only in Jordan that she began to take pride in her roots. She learned Arabic and appreciated Middle Eastern food and hospitality. When she returned to the U.S., she began to wear a headscarf as an act of defiance against a rising anti-Muslim tide.“I lost a lot of friends, people started treating me differently,” she said. But she also became an ambassador for her faith. Students, even teachers, stopped her in school and asked about the Quran and Islam.“I had to learn as much as I possibly could about my own religion, the ins and outs of it, what Islamophobes were saying about it, so that I could understand how to respond,” she said.Eventually, she concluded that if the people around her had those questions, so did many others.In recent years, Forbes magazine chose her for its “30 Under 30” list of top achievers. Michelle Obama asked her to speak at the United State of Women Summit. She was also part of a panel that included female astronaut Cody Coleman and was moderated by former President Bill Clinton. Most recently, she served on an advisory committee for the live-action remake of Disney’s “Aladdin” and attended the premiere.“It was such a full-circle moment for me, because when I was a little girl, Princess Jasmine was one of the only representations that I had growing up,” she said.Being on the committee allowed her “to try to course-correct some of the problematic stereotypes” in the first movie, including some that she did not notice as a child.She pointed to two examples: The opening song talked about a faraway place that is “barbaric.” And Jasmine was dressed in a belly dancing outfit and chains in a “hyper-sexualized and oppressive way.”On her site, Al-Khatahtbeh is especially proud of stories that deal with race and sexuality. “Of course, female sexuality is honored within our religion, and it shouldn’t be something we shy away from or think of as a taboo.”Most of the site’s visitors live in the U.S. and Britain, and an estimated 70% are Millennials and Gen Z ages 15 to 32. One of the site’s most controversial stories was written by a Muslim transgender convert.“We want to push the envelope that way by creating that space and reminding people that they have a place within our religion,” she said. “I’m really proud of that, because one thing MuslimGirl does really well is we attract youth. They want to come in, and they want to learn more about Islam because of the way that we put it out there. We always say that our language is the Millennial tongue.”
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