passion Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When the guy doing the pre-show intro of a festival flick precedes the screening by warning the audience that the ending "should come with Prozac", you know you're not in for an uplifting 90 or so minutes. Actually, I had read the program description of Passion, which was having its North American premiere here in Seattle in the closing days of the Seattle Arab and Iranian Film Festival (an event, by the way, that was so packed with good films, I'm going to have to clear more room off my calendar for it next year), and I knew the topic was honor killings, so I figured going in it wasn't going to have a cheery ending. What I didn't know going in was that the film's director, Mohamed Malas, had to shoot his film in Paris, because the Syrian government wouldn't let him shoot there. The film has been banned in Syria as well, so it won't be seen there, either. Writer-director Malas was inspired to write the film after reading a snippet in a Syrian paper about a woman who was slain by her uncle, two cousins and two brothers in an "honor killing" because she had developed a passion for the songs of Egyptian singer Oum Kalsoum.

Last week, our Monday Morning Poll topic was on the upcoming 9/11 films -- United 93, which comes out this month, and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, starring Nicolas Cage, which opens August 11. At the same time we asked that poll question (and we're certainly not the only film site asking ourselves and our readers if it's too soon for a film about 9/11) -- the Seattle Arab and Iranian Film Festival (SAIFF) was running here in Seattle. It's a small festival, without the furious deal-making and hot "scene" of Sundance or the red carpets and brouhaha surrounding Cannes, or even the mild fervor that will be generated in Seattle at the end of May with the opening of the Seattle International Film Festival.

Yet now, perhaps more than ever before, smaller film fests -- especially the culture-centric fests like SAIFF, the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, which ran here recently, and lots of other smaller fests around the country -- matter. They matter because it is at these smaller fests that hundreds of seeds of social conscience and cultural understanding are sown. Hopefully some of those seeds will get picked up and scattered around at the larger fests where they'll get more press and attention, but even for those that don't score large play on the festival circuit, much less the Holy Grail of indie film, distribution, small film festivals give their voices a chance to be heard.