1. THE ONE MAN VILLAGE – Simon El Habre takes Lebanese Oscar
2. Now as DVD on demand – THE NORTH ROAD by Carlos Chahine
3. DVD of the month: THE SHOOTER
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1. THE ONE MAN VILLAGE – Simon El Habre takes Lebanese Oscar

Last Friday Simon El Habre was awarded with the Murex D’Or for the best Lebanese Cinema Movie at a ceremony in Byblos for his internationally acclaimed THE ONE MAN VILLAGE.
The Murex D’Or is also called the Lebanese Oscar, the award ceremony is held annually in Lebanon to honor Lebanese, Arab, regional and international personalities who play significant roles in the art fields.

Content
Semaan is leading a quiet life on his farm in the small village Ain el-Halazoun in the Lebanese mountains. The hamlet was completely emptied and destroyed in combats during the civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. Today, many years after an official reconciliation, its inhabitants which are all from one family regularly go back to the village to cultivate their plots of land or visit their houses and always leave before sunset.
In his comforting and humorous film Simon El Habre observes the life in his quasi ghost village and tries to reflect on the collective and individual memory in a country that seems to live in a collective amnesia and is vulnerable to a new civil war.
Simon El Habre, Lebanon 2008, 86 min, color, HDCAM, Arabic with English subtitles
Film-website

The release of the DVD of the film is planned for summer 2010. The release date will be announced next week and pre-order will be possible at mec film-shop
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2. Now as DVD on demand – THE NORTH ROAD by Carlos Chahine

Content
Karim, mid fourties, lives in France since his early teenage years. For the first time in many years he returns to Lebanon to transfer his father remains, who died during the war, from Beirut to his home village.

We ultimately chose the winner for its poetic, truthful and unsentimental portrait of an exile’s return home to deal with his father’s death 20 years earlier. The director, Carlos Chahine, portrays the absurdities and contradictions of how we deal with grief through humor, freshness and subtlety. (Jury Statement Tribeca International Film Festival)

Carlos Chahine, Lebanon/France, 2008, 25 min, Arabic/French
Subtitles: English
PAL, region free
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3. DVD of the Month: THE SHOOTER

Content
Palestine is occupied by the international media. It is being staged by the international media for sensational newscasts and Palestinians have become "performers" of dramatic international evening newscasts.
The Shooter questions the Palestinian resistance struggle and its decadence, reaching the point of the actual chaos and lack of control.

In this short film Ihab Jaddallah evokes, not without a certain humor, the struggle and the resistance of the Palestinians in these times of trouble and chaos through a whimsical self-reference. He thus also denounces the satiric attitude of a journalist, the comportment of the media, spectators and greed for violence. Critical of the instrumentalisation of the war and at the same time manifesting a new generation of Palestinian artists, THE SHOOTER is a meta-film: intelligent, sharp-sighted and skilful. (Paris Cinema)

Ihab Jadallah, Palestine 2007, 7 min, colour, Arabic
Subtitles: English or Spanish
PAL, region free, on stock
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