Modern Arabian cinema gets top billing at the Singapore International Film Festival, with a controversial movie on a Muslim woman’s search for personal freedom opening the annual event tomorrow.

Three hundred independent films from over 45 countries will be screened during the 17-day festival, with a special segment called The Secret Life of Arabia showcasing a region undergoing major social and political change.

Acclaimed Lebanese director Jocelyne Saab’s Kiss Me Not On The Eyes, making its Asian debut, is set in Cairo and chronicles a 23-year-old Egyptian woman’s struggles against social taboos as she pursues her love of poetry and belly dancing.

A scene from the movie showing a girl getting a clitoridectomy triggered a storm of controversy when it premiered at the Cairo International Film Festival in December.

“We always like having an opening film which is visually interesting but also thematically challenging,” festival director Philip Cheah said.

“So in this case, it’s a female director and I would call it a feminist film from the Muslim world because it’s about a girl, a dancer who wants to be more expressive but she finds that the role for a modern Muslim woman is very restrictive.”

Acclaimed Lebanese director Jocelyn Saab’s Kiss Me Not on the Eyes, will make its Asian debut at the 19th Singapore International Film Festival.

Saab, who will be in Singapore during the festival, said her film’s theme is about feminine desire and the empowerment of the youth.

“It’s about freedom of thinking, about freedom of expression,” the former war journalist said by telephone from Paris.

“The drama point of the film is female genital mutilation and I use it symbolically to also talk about mutilation of the spirit,” said Saab.

Other Arabian films on the programme include The Flood In Baath Country by Omar Amiralay, a 48-minute documentary about the propaganda machine in Syria glorifying the Damascus regime.

Also set in Syria, female director Diana El Jeiroudi’s The Pot features four married women sharing their feelings about the roles and images of females in their society.

“The emphasis on the state of pregnancy and the fact of having children always arises if the woman didn’t get pregnant soon after marriage,” Jeiroudi said in response to e-mailed queries.

“So the whole idea of this pushing towards having children makes it a good entry for me to talk about the female identity and to describe it as a pot,” she said.

In Iraq, My Country – An Exile’s Return To Samawa, Melbourne-based Hadi Mahmood goes back to his country 14 years after fleeing. He filmed the daily lives of Iraqis in his hometown trying to make a living in the period between the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein and the installation of a new US-backed government.

Fellow Iraqi director Layth Abdulamir’s Iraq: The Song of The Missing Men offers another view of the country in the form of a travelogue, with interviews of ordinary citizens like farmers and mullahs.

“This is very eye-opening,” said festival director Cheah. “If you just see the news reports on the Iraq war, you don’t realise there is so much cultural diversity in the country.”

In keeping with tradition, this year’s festival also features a wide selection of Asian films, including perennial favourites Japan and India dealing with topics like human rights and marriage.

From Southeast Asia, Indonesian director Riri Riza’s Gie traces the life of political activist Soe Hok-Gie during the 1960s, considered the darkest period in the country’s history due to bloody political strife.

The Philippines’ Pepot Superstar by director Clodualdo del Mundo Junior is a 110-minute musical comedy set in the 1970s during the rule of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos. It explores the country’s penchant for entertainment in the midst of serious social and economic problems.

Promise Me Not is a love story from Thailand about a devoted couple who commit suicide and swear to be together – and how fate can intervene to thwart the plans of mortals.

More than 40,000 filmgoers are expected to attend the festival, which will be a special occasion for the local film community because a Singaporean movie, 4:30, will serve as the closing show for the first time in the event’s 19-year history.

“It’s a very, very big honour definitely,” said director Royston Tan. His 93-minute show is about the loneliness of an 11-year-old boy and the unusual bond he forges with a Korean man who has come to Singapore with a mission: to kill himself. – AFP

Full schedules and bookings at (www.filmfest.org.sg).

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