CineMAS Love Is Not An Orange / Super 8 Years / Silences of the Palace

3pm Love Is Not An Orange dir Otilia Babara (2022)

In the early 1990s, women left Moldova in large numbers to provide for their families. Unable to return home, they found a peculiar way to stay in touch: sending large cardboard boxes filled with the kind of gifts and food Romanians could only dream about in those days. In return, their children would send videotapes.

Through these intimate private archives, Otilia Babara depicts the fragility of family bonds through the eyes of a generation of mothers and daughters who were forced to live apart to survive. In doing so, she portrays a post-soviet country caught at a crossroads of history — in which women were unwittingly put in charge of making the transition from communism to capitalism.

Romanian with English subtitles.

5pm The Super 8 Years dir David Ernaux-Briot, Annie Ernaux (2022)

For over decade from 1972, Philippe Ernaux used a Super 8 camera to capture family life, from distant journeys to intimate moments. In this film made with her son David Ernaux-Briot, Annie Ernaux (winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature) reflects on the stories told in the margins of the footage, or beyond. As the children grew older and the marriage begins to come unstuck, what remains is the film bearing weathered witness to what once was …

French with English subtitles. Presented in collaboration with Institut Français. There’s a post-screening discussion between Hind Mezaina and Yann Rodier, Head of History Department at Sorbonne Abu Dhabi.

7.30pm Silences of the Palace dir Moufida Tlatli (1996)

The patriarchs of the Tunisian elite marry within their own class but enjoy as concubines the women who serve the household and live downstairs. In adolescence, Alia, the child of one of these upstairs–downstairs relationships, becomes increasingly aware of her own mother’s predicament in this power dynamic; Alia herself does not feel liberated, even by the musical talent which has given her a career. She must confront her own past before she can come to terms with her mother’s life and death, and thereby free herself.

French with English subtitles.

The CineMAS contemporary Arab cinema series is a mini-festival of independent films curated by Hind Mezaina and presented by the NYUAD Film and New Media Program in partnership with the NYUAD Arts Center. Day tickets are AED 30, weekend (Saturday & Sunday) tickets are AED 50, a full-week pass is AED 150..