Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Amal & Cat Call
Amal is the kind of film I expect to see a lot more of from French-speaking Europe over the next decade: well-intended, competently-made, and incredibly simplistic films that divide the rising Islamic community in Europe into either the good European progressives that hide all religiosity from the p
The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PӦFF) runs in-person in Tallinn, Estonia from November 3-19. The Boston Hassle’s Joshua Polanski will be reviewing and interviewing live from Estonia as part of his multi-outlet coverage of the festival. Be sure to check out his website for updates on additional coverage.
AMAL (2023) — dir. Jawad Rhalib
Amal is the kind of film I expect to see a lot more of from French-speaking Europe over the next decade: well-intended, competently-made, and incredibly simplistic films that divide the rising Islamic community in Europe into either the good European progressives that hide all religiosity from the public or extremists with an inclination to terrorism. It’s not a terrible film– I actually enjoyed it for the most part– but it would be doing no one a service to deny the simple and frankly harmful politique binary that motivates the picture.
Amal (Lubna Azabal) is a literature teacher at a majority Muslim school in Belgium. Mounia (Kenza Benbouchta) is a Muslim girl with a Moroccan background who is also attracted to women—a contradiction that shakes the world of her traditionalist peer students. She’s bullied and threatened, including with a drawing of a “dyke” being pushed off a building, relentlessly by her homophobic classmates. Amal, whose name means hope in Arabic, can’t stand for this and assigns readings by the radical erotic poet Abu Nawas from Arabic antiquity. The classmates react to his homoerotic poems with pandemonium.
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.
Cat Call (2023) — dir. Rozália Szeleczki
No film festival passes without some sort of affront to art. That’s just the nature of what happens when hundreds of films are programmed together. Cat Call, a Hungarian film from the First Feature Competition category, is one of those films.
With a runtime just a few minutes over an hour and a half that somehow drags for an eternity, it was one of the most excruciating watches of the festival.
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.