Cairo-born filmmaker Tahani Rached.
Egyptian-Canadian filmmaker Tahani Rached is being honoured at this year's Hot Docs festival with a retrospective of her documentaries.
"We hope that it brings her work back into focus, both of the past and contemporary work she's doing, and of course a discussion of the issues and the humanity that she puts in to all her films," says senior Canadian programmer Lynne Fernie.
Born in Cairo in 1947, Tahani Rached emigrated to Montreal in the late 1960s, where she studied at the city's École des Beaux-Arts. From her first documentary in 1973, Pour faire changement (To Make a Change) through her work as a National Film Board staff filmmaker from 1980 to 2004, Rached has explored the lives of those on the margins with an honesty and sensitivity that has given her, and the audience, rare access to her subjects.
"The best documentarians have this ability to empathize," Fernie says. That ability is clear in Rachad's latest film, Neighbors, also showing at the festival this year.
Beirut! Not Enough Death to Go Round
**
Filmed shortly after the massacres of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, this film captures the life of those who have been displaced by war as they struggle to build their lives amid the rubble of an abandoned resort town in western Lebanon. Whether it is in lining up for rations, dealing with the Red Cross as the aid organization attempts to track those who are missing, or simply trying to build homes from the piles of bricks and debris that are seemingly everywhere, the film is a candid look at those who truly suffer the consequences of war.
May 8, 7:15 p.m., Innis Town Hall
These Girls
***
Following the lives of young women living on the streets of Cairo, Rached captures not only their fears and tragedies but also their joy and bravado in this emotionally raw documentary from 2006. The teenagers live with the prospect of being raped, kidnapped or attacked by men, and several bear the scars on their faces of past assaults. One young pregnant girl is told her father wants to kill her for dishonouring the family. And while they sometimes break down in tears over the hardships of their lives, the girls also prove to have the strength and defiance such a life requires, whether it's fighting off men or dancing in the street.
May 7, 3:45 p.m., Cumberland 3
Au Chic Resto Pop
***
The Chic Resto Pop, a Montreal soup kitchen that serves food to those in need, is the focal point for this examination of poverty in the city that was made in 1990. But it is the people who run the Resto Pop who provide a sense of joy to what could easily be a rueful endeavour. Between taking food that has been thrown away or donated by restaurants and groceries and turning it in to 300 meals a day, talking to school officials about feeding hungry children and exploring poor neighbourhoods, the people of the Resto Pop also perform six amateur folk songs they have composed on the themes of their work that gives the film an inspiring hope and optimism.
May 6, 4:30 p.m., Cumberland 2
Neighbors
**
Returning once again to her native Cairo, Rached explores the Garden City quarter of Egypt's capital, a once wealthy enclave during the mid-20th century that has since fallen into decline and which has witnessed a huge expansion of the U.S. embassy that has frustrated many local shop owners. As the camera moves through lavish villas that are now abandoned and past the huge security perimeter at the embassy, Neighbors explores not only Egypt's past relationships with foreign governments and its own inner turmoil, but also how the country is still intruded upon by foreign governments today.
May 7, 9:30 p.m. Isabel Bader; May 8, 4:45 p.m., ROM