Unlocking Doors of Cinema is a feature documentary exploring the fifty years of artistic contribution of the daring Syrian auteur Muhammad Malas. Malas, an exile from his home town of Quneitra, provokes audiences to contemplate loss, memory, and home. From the 1967 War and Palestinian Camps in Beirut, to the songs of Aleppo, and the political tragedies of Syria, Malas exemplifies what it means to be an auteur and public intellectual. Unlocking Doors of Cinema takes you on a unique cinematic journey where creative cinematography becomes a visual conversation with the auteur's own five decades of work.
Director Statement
The films, writings, and life of Muhammad Malas offer a testament to the heroism of persistence and expression. Even though they reflect an existential melancholia and yearning for what has been lost, he is not a victim of a map. The forced maps of the world hurt us, configure us, and yet they also allow us to create.
Malas’s cinema has spread his creativity around the world to film festivals, television, schools, libraries and bookstores since the early 1970s. Now, Unlocking Doors of Cinema, presents his work and life in a cinematic vision that I developed while writing the book, Cinema of Muhammad Malas. The documentary replicates aesthetic ideas of mise-en-scene and cinematography to reveal Malas’s creative work and confront Malas's 50 years of filmmaking in Syria and the Arab world.
This feature documentary develops a greater understanding of his achievements as a filmmaker and intellectual from a country that, to most readers, has become a metaphor for war, refugees, and geo-political conflict.
What has happened in Syria is a disaster beyond comprehension, yet again— numbers of fatalities and disease continue to increase, viral videos and photos continue to screen, and global media outlets continue to keeps readers hooked up to the latest atrocities.
When discussing Syria in the future, we imagine similar debates the world over echoing, with a different referent, Theodore Adorno’s line “there is no poetry after Aushwitz”, signifying the impossibility of producing beautiful expression after a horrific experience.
Yet this disaster of Syria is not a simple theoretical or aesthetic construct. The mere mention of Syria and an understanding of its present status are starting points that require a cinematic and humanist approach to contextualize historical and cultural realities, to search for truth between the cinema of the past and the values that Muhammad Malas still embodies to this day.
- Runtime61 minutes
- CountryUnited Arab Emirates
- DirectorNezar Andary
Unlocking Doors of Cinema is a feature documentary exploring the fifty years of artistic contribution of the daring Syrian auteur Muhammad Malas. Malas, an exile from his home town of Quneitra, provokes audiences to contemplate loss, memory, and home. From the 1967 War and Palestinian Camps in Beirut, to the songs of Aleppo, and the political tragedies of Syria, Malas exemplifies what it means to be an auteur and public intellectual. Unlocking Doors of Cinema takes you on a unique cinematic journey where creative cinematography becomes a visual conversation with the auteur's own five decades of work.
Director Statement
The films, writings, and life of Muhammad Malas offer a testament to the heroism of persistence and expression. Even though they reflect an existential melancholia and yearning for what has been lost, he is not a victim of a map. The forced maps of the world hurt us, configure us, and yet they also allow us to create.
Malas’s cinema has spread his creativity around the world to film festivals, television, schools, libraries and bookstores since the early 1970s. Now, Unlocking Doors of Cinema, presents his work and life in a cinematic vision that I developed while writing the book, Cinema of Muhammad Malas. The documentary replicates aesthetic ideas of mise-en-scene and cinematography to reveal Malas’s creative work and confront Malas's 50 years of filmmaking in Syria and the Arab world.
This feature documentary develops a greater understanding of his achievements as a filmmaker and intellectual from a country that, to most readers, has become a metaphor for war, refugees, and geo-political conflict.
What has happened in Syria is a disaster beyond comprehension, yet again— numbers of fatalities and disease continue to increase, viral videos and photos continue to screen, and global media outlets continue to keeps readers hooked up to the latest atrocities.
When discussing Syria in the future, we imagine similar debates the world over echoing, with a different referent, Theodore Adorno’s line “there is no poetry after Aushwitz”, signifying the impossibility of producing beautiful expression after a horrific experience.
Yet this disaster of Syria is not a simple theoretical or aesthetic construct. The mere mention of Syria and an understanding of its present status are starting points that require a cinematic and humanist approach to contextualize historical and cultural realities, to search for truth between the cinema of the past and the values that Muhammad Malas still embodies to this day.
- Runtime61 minutes
- CountryUnited Arab Emirates
- DirectorNezar Andary