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BEIRUT ANIMATED 3RD EDITION Beirut, Lebanon, 14-18 June 2013

My first trip to the Middle East proved to be the amazing experience I had expected it to be.  Unfortunately I had to miss the first two days of the Beirut Animated Festival due to commitments at Annecy.  I left early on Sunday morning from the Geneva airport.  My first surprise came when I landed at the Beirut airport.  The festival staff had told me that I could purchase a visa when I arrived at the airport, but as it turned out with my official invitation to participate in a cultural event, there was no charge for my visa. Even though I would only be there for four days, the visa was issued to me for a month.

With a minimal staff and a very limited budget, festival director Sarra Maali and her staff have created an impressive  festival. Headquartered at the beautiful Metropolis Cinema, it combined the best of Middle Eastern animation with a varied selection of international features and short animated films.   The opening night was kicked off with a screening of the French feature The Rabbi’s Cat and I was told that the  several hundred seat theatre was full.

Lina Younes and Nancy at an old outdoor coffee house overlooking the Mediterannean Sea

Along with giving Lebanese audiences the opportunity to see high quality animation that is seldom screened in local theatres, the festival was designed to be a platform where Lebanese, Arabic, and International animators can meet to exchange ideas and discuss issues related to the production and development of animation.  I was very sorry to miss the Saturday afternoon panel discussion about the independent animation scene in Lebanon.  According to the catalogue the panel was divided into four sections.  Educators discussed how animation is taught in Lebanese Universities, representatives from production companies debated the question of what place does animation have in their yearly production strategies, and three members of the animation community discussed the pros and cons of commercial versus independent work.  A showcase of films by independent animators rounded out the program.

The evening screenings began with two programs of Lebanese and Arab short films.  I would like to have seen them with an audience but the festival did arrange for me to watch all of the films in a screening room the next day.  As might be expected in a city that has been torn apart by Civil War, many of the films centered on coping with memories of war and the past and present threat of being drawn into the bloody Syrian conflict.

I was extremely impressed and moved by Lina Ghaibeh’s film Burj El Murr:  Tower of Bitterness.  Burj El Murr, built to be the Beirut Trade Center, is a forty story skyscraper begun in 1970 but never completed due to the Civil War (1975 to 1990).  Because of its strategic location in the city and its height, the tower was occupied by the armed militia.  They used the upper floors as a sniper hideout and the basement as a prison for hostages.  Although most of Beirut’s city center was destroyed during the war or razed to the ground during post war reconstruction, Burj El Murr is still waiting to be demolished.  The empty tower rises above the city as a grim reminder of the past.  Ghaibeh captured the horrific memories that the tower evokes to city residents.

Lina teaches animation and motion graphics at the American University of Beirut as well as being a comic artist.  During the festival there was a book signing for her new book about the sad story of the Lebanese train stations.  The country’s rail service began in the 1890’s and continued through most of the 20th century as the last stop of the legendary Orient Express.  During the civil war many miles of track were destroyed and rail service ceased to exist.

At the American University of Beiruit - view from the garden down to the sea

Lina taught a class at American University’s Department of Architecture entitled Hijaz Railway, Illustrating Stations in Time: Graphic Narratives of a Journey Through Lebanon’s Railway Stations.  She and her students visited abandoned stations along the Hijaz line searching for remnants of the stations’ once glorious past and interviewing people about their memories of riding the trains.  They turned the stories into short graphic novels which were collected together to form a book.  There are also photographs of some of the train stations along with pictures of the students and the mementos they found along the way.

Lina Ghaibeh standing by a poster for her book

The week before the festival Beirut Animated offered a week long workshop.  Seven young Arab animators collaborated to produce a short film about Mar Mikhael railroad station.  The film makers set out to make the train, stuck in the station since it was abandoned in 1975, move once again through the magic of animation. The closing night audience was thrilled to see the old train move again even if it was only for a short while on film.  You can watch the film at:  brofessionalreview.com/tag/David-Habchy

Fouad by Joan Baz and David Habchy also carried quite a punch.  The film, about the constant fears that haunt young Fouad whose father is one of 17,000 disappeared, is intensified by the use of black and white.  Fouad was commissioned by  “Act for the Disappeared”, a Lebanese Human Rights Organization.

Tunisian animator Nadia Rais’ L’ Mrayet   told the story of Boum Mrayet who is hired by a firm specializing in writing the future so that they can always control it.  I saw the 12 minute drawn film at the 2012 Annecy Animation Festival and enjoyed seeing it again as much as I did the first time.

The two International Shorts programs gave the audiences a chance to see what is being created in other parts of the world.  Though I have seen and written about all of the films before, from the lead off film, Oh Willy, to Oh Sheep!,  which concluded the second program, the selection was so good that I was happy to see them all again.

The feature length films were of equally high quality.  Acclaimed animator Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such A Beautiful Day was screened as well as Chris Sullivan’s Consuming Spirits.  Sullivan’s film is about as far from a cartoon for kids as animation can get.  The story of three colleagues who have a long, bizarre history together seamlessly combines cut out animation, pencil drawing, collage, and stop motion and took over a decade to complete.

The beautiful French, Belgian, Luxembourg co-production Ernest and Celestine was screened on Sunday afternoon when the entire family could enjoy it.  The festival held the Lebanese premier, after which the film will be on screens all across Lebanon.

A special evening was devoted to a tribute to the master of cinematic special effects Ray Harryhausen.  I have seen Richard Schickel’s documentary The Harryhausen Chronicles several times before, and the sixty minute look into the life and hard work of a genius continues to fascinate me.  No matter how many times I watch it I always discover new details.  Harryhausen’s masterpiece, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was screened nextand it was pure delight to see the Cyclops, dragon and sword welding skeletons come to life after hearing him talk about creating them in the documentary.

A retrospective program of anime dubbed into Arabic brought three classics that aired across the Arabic world during the ‘60’s and ‘70’s.  Al Amira Yaqout ( 1967), Zena Wa Nahoul (1975), and Lady Oscar (1979) are all noteworthy because they all featured female heroines.

I was pleased to present and talk about a program of historical animation.  Although the audience was not large, the people who attended were very interested in what I showed.  Many people came up after the screening to thank me for showing so many films from the past such as Hoppin and Gross’s Joie de Vivre and Max Fleischer’s Swing You Sinner  which have never been shown in Beirut before and wanted to know where they could find more of these classics to watch.

An interactive animation, Approximate Feast created by Lantian Xie, was installed on a screen in the theatre lobby.   When an observer watches from a distance, the group of Arab men dining on the screen are busy consuming a traditional meal of lamb on top of a bed of rice.  As the viewer approaches nearer to the screen, the diners become increasingly cautious and timid until they stop eating all together leaving their meal untouched.  As the “intruder” retreats away, the diners return to their feast.  Lantian Xie was born in China and raised in Bahrain and The United Arab Emirate.  He studied at the Chicago Art Institute and Approximate Feast was previously exhibited in London and Denver, Colorado.

A large audience attended the closing night screening of Katsuhrio Otomo’s  Akira.  The 1988 manga classic is extremely violent.  Tokyo is wiped out by a silent explosion of light and replaced by Neo Tokyo where  gangs of bikers clash ultra-violently in the streets.   An old man in a child’s body witnesses a bloody execution which causes him to unleash a psychic shock wave that shatters the glass of the surrounding mega structures and this is all in the first twenty minutes.  Otomo revealed in a recent interview that he plans to begin a new manga series set in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s during Japan’s Meiji period.

The day after the festival was officially over at the theatre, Joan Baz and David Habchy, two founding members of the Waraq Collective, launched the Manara Hully Gully project as part of Animation in the City, which is a joint project between Beirut Animated and members of the Waraq Collective.  The gigantic Manara Hully Gully or Spinning Bride in Luna Park, an amusement park on a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, was transformed into a large zoetrope with the aid of Velcro and painted paper cups.  Participants designed patterns on a peg board grid using red, blue, and yellow push pins, the colors of the cups.  Once the pattern was finished, the cups with Velcro on the bottom were attached to Velcro strips on the outside of the Hully Gully. As The Dancing Bride revolved, the audience could see the pattern projected onto a big screen at the exact speed of a camera shutter giving the illusion of a moving picture.

The Hully Gully with pattern elements

If the amazing patterns are hard to imagine you can read a complete explanation of the project and see the Hully Gully in action at http://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/acblogs/how-we-made-a-giant-zoetrope.  After successfully completing this project Joan Baz and David Habchy hope to receive a grant to develop their zoetrope idea further.

Luna Park entrance

 

Hully Gully participants creating patterns on pegboards

Placing cups on the velcro

One afternoon I visited the Waraq Collective and met all four of the founding members.  The quartet lives and creates art in an old yellow house called Beit Waraq which is an open cultural space for the community.  They host monthly workshops in illustration, animation, art direction, and performing arts.  There are also screenings of a wide variety of animation and live action filmsin their lovely tree shaded garden courtyard.

The courtyard of the Waraq Collective

The yellow house was the birth place of the Hully Gully project.  I spent a lovely afternoon sitting in the cool courtyard sticking Velcro on the bottom of the paper cups while getting to know these talented artists.  I am very happy  that they allowed me to play a small part in the project.  My afternoon at Waraq Collective is a very special memory.

I also met comic book artist Fadi Baqi (also known as Fdz) at the collective.  Fadi is one of the leaders of the small but growing number of comic authors in the Middle East.  He is also one of the publishers of Samandal, a multi lingual comic magazine.  According to Fadi “Samandal aims to produce a comic book revolution that will herald a new era of peace and understanding between cultures in the Middle East and the rest of the world”.

Samandal publishes in Arabic, French, and English in each issue, with sections switching between left-to-right and right-to-left.  The editors hit upon an innovation they call a “floppy page”.  The “floppy page” tells the reader to flip the book upside down to continue reading the next selection.  Submissions for this very adult comic are welcome from all over the world.  I came home with a big stack of these wonderful books thanks to a very generous gift from Fadi.  I am  really enjoying reading them so much.  They are a nice reminder of my visit to Beirut.

On another afternoon I was invited to visit Future Television station by George Khoury, who has been head of the animation department since it was launched in 1993.  The station has a very active and full animation staff so they broadcast a great deal of animation.  I got to watch a selection of their work while I was there.  Although much of their animated content is short political pieces they also produce children’s programs and some fun projects such as an animated soap opera.  The soap ran for two years and the inside joke was that the images of the characters were based on people who worked at the station.  George kindly burned four DVD’s of animation that he and his excellent team have produced.  I have watched them several times since I have been home and even though they are all in Arabic, the political messages and humor translate visually.  I truly appreciate the time George and his crew spent with me and allowing me to see another creative side of animation in Beirut.

The garden at Future TV

At Future TV station with George Khoury on Nancy's right with two staff animators

I can’t thank Festival Director Sarra Maali and Lina Younes, part of the festival artistic team, enough for inviting me to Beirut Animated.  Lina, along with Sarra and her husband Hisham Youness generously opened their homes to me which gave me a real picture of life in the city.  I especially want to thank them for the wonderful opportunity I had to sample the diverse food of the city.  I will never forget the beautiful restaurant that Lina took me to where I had the chance to sample a vast array of Armenian delicacies.  The lamb stewed in cherries was a truly amazing dish.  I also appreciated the opportunity to enjoy home cooking at Sarra and Hisham’s home where I ate traditional food that was made by his mother.  On my flight back home I was the envy of all of the passengers sitting near me when I declined the airplane meal and pulled out the homemade meal that Sarra and Hisham packed for me.

Even though I was only in Beirut for four short days I will never forget the Arab animation that I saw or the sights, sounds, and tastes of that exciting city teaming with night life, and most of all the marvelous people that I met.   If you are ever lucky enough to be invited to Beirut Animated be sure not to miss this wonderful experience and I hope that I will be invited back to the festival again soon.  To learn more about the 3rd edition of Beirut Animation visit www.metropoliscinema.net/2013/beirut-animated-3rd-edition/