Introduction to and programme notes for the "restored and beautiful" section at the 14th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, December 2025. — EK
The films in this section, spanning six formative decades of cinema history, start and end in the Middle East, offering a sense of the resilience of its people. The canonical documentary masterpiece Grass (1925) follows three Americans traveling among the nomadic tribes of Iran, while Ghazl El-Banat (1985) adopts an insider’s point of view in which the great Arab filmmaker Jocelyne Saab gently removes the shrapnel from the wounded body of her hometown, Beirut.
If Ghazl El-Banat is its director’s finest work, then Craig’s Wife (1936) is the masterpiece of American director Dorothy Arzner. A tale of a toxic lady of the house, no melodrama has so precisely and exhilaratingly explored the intertwined themes of house, territory, and power.
