CASABLANCA, WHERE THE ANGELS DON’T FLY Wins at 2004 Carthage Film Festival
by Andre Soares
Mohammed Asli’s Casablanca, Where the Angels Don’t Fly, was the winner of the Gold Tanit for best film at the 20th edition of the biennial Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia. Casablanca, Where the Angels Don’t Fly depicts the plight of three migrant Berber workers who try to eke out a living in Morocco’s largest city.
Among the other pictures shown at Carthage were In the Battlefields by Lebanon’s Danielle Arbid; the Egyptian-made I Love Cinema, by Oussama Faouzi, the tale of a young boy’s love for movies set in an environment of strict religious intolerance (the film is Egypt’s entry for the Academy Awards); and Zaman, Man of the Reeds by Iraq’s Amer Alwan.
As quoted in The Daily Star, Alwan explained that he "wanted to make a film that was about humanity; that had a universal appeal and feel. The first film I ever saw when I was eight in Iraq was Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief. To this day I still remember that film." Two of the stellar guests at the festival were Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and actor Omar Sharif.
The Carthage Film Festival is one of the most important showcases for Arab films, which are generally plagued by government censorship and poor distribution even in their own region.
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