2/21 - The Night of Counting the Years
Wednesday (2/21)**, we’ll be screening The Night of Counting the Years (1969), written and directed by Shadi Abdel Salam. The film is Salam’s only full length feature and is considered a gem of Egyptian cinema.
** This is a correction — originally it said Sunday 2/11, but this is, in fact, in the future!
Our candle Matt picked selected next week’s movie:
A beautiful and hypnotic neo-realist Egyptian film from 1969, set in 1881, just before British colonial rule, telling the true story of the Abd el-Rassuls, an Upper-Egyptian clan. The relationship they have with their village tomb reaches a climactic point when the Antiquities Service begins investigating the source of artifacts on the black market. In 2013 the Dubai Film Festival listed it as "the greatest Arab film of all time."
from the director Shadi Abdel Salam: "I think that the people of my country are ignorant of our history and I feel that it is my mission to make them know some of it. I regard cinema not as a consumerist art, but as a historical document for the next generations."
from Martin Scorsese “[It] has an extremely unusual tone – stately, poetic, with a powerful grasp of time and the sadness it carries. The carefully measured pace, the almost ceremonial movement of the camera, the desolate settings, the classical Arabic spoken on the soundtrack, the unsettling score by the great Italian composer Mario Nascimbene – they all work in perfect harmony and contribute to the feeling of fateful inevitability."
a rare film, undeniably important, capturing magic
The Night of Counting the Years will be playing at Working Room on Wednesday, February 21st. The doors will open at 7:30 and the movie at 8:00!