Origin: Syria | Documentary | Director: Mohammad Malas | 45 minutes

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The Dream

Mohammad Malas

Filmed in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, Lebanon,
shortly before the infamous massacre of 1982, this Syrian documentary's
principle reference is dreams, and not lived reality. It plays in this way
on a double register, whereby women, children, the elderly, and combatants
each recall the reality of their everyday, transposed eerily into their
dreams, nightmares and premonitions. Ultimately they converge on what the
Palestinians have had taken away from them: their homeland and the life of
dignity it afforded them. Mohammad Malas is a prolific filmmaker, working
in art, fiction, and documentary genres after teaching philosophy at
Damascus University in the 1960s, he turned to film and has since produced
numerous award winning works, notably a series of powerful documentaries on
political prisoners in the Arab world. He has also published novels and
writes frequently on Arab cinema.

The Dream (AL-MANAM) (new digital copy) by Mohamad Malas, docu 45 min.
Syria 1987, Arabic with English, German or French subtitles.
For a preview copy contact irit@mecfilm.de
This classic al-Manam (The Dream), which was released 30 years ago, is
available for festivals and institutions with new digital copies, either
mov or Blu-ray with mec film.American University of Cairo Press published
the director's film diary The Dream: A Diary of a Film in December last
year.Content
"Haj: Don't you see the horses carrying soldiers in the sky?
Woman 1: They landed on earth and transformed to green (blue) and brown
roosters. they started to fight each other.
Old man: they are fighting each other so as to liberate Palestine.
Woman 2: Like Cain and Abel."
Shot in 1980-81, the film is composed of interviews with different
Palestinian refugees including children, women, old people, and militants
from the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila, Bourj el-Barajneh, Ain al-Hilweh
and Rashidieh in Lebanon. In the interviews Mohamad Malas questions them
about their dreams at night. The dreams always converge on Palestine: a
woman recounts her dreams about winning the war. a fedai of bombardment and
martyrdom. and one man tells of a dream where he meets and is ignored by
Gulf emirs. During filming Malas lived in the camps and conducted
interviews with more than 400 people. In 1982 the Sabra and Shatila
massacres occurred, taking the lives of several people he interviewed, and
he stopped working on the project. He returned to it in 1986 and edited the
many hours of footage gathered into this 45 minute film, released in 1987.

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