THE NIGHT
(الليل)
dir. Mohammad Malas, 1992
Syria.  116 min.
In Arabic with English Subtitles

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6 - 7:30pm
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15 - 7:00pm w Q+A (this event is $10)
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23 - 7:30pm

In November, Spectacle screened Mohommad Malas’ short lyrical documentary The Dream (1987). Now, we present one of his subsequent feature films, The Night (1992). Set in the village of Quneitra in the years between the Great Revolt of 1936 and the Arab–Israeli War of 1948, Malas cites Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and Kurosawa’s Babarossa as references for this abstract narrative about a son who visits the resting place of his father, an old Syrian resistance fighter.

Malas explains that the film “revolves around the idea of a lost place, and covers the decade of the 1930s, when the first (of many to come) coup d’état took place and the military junta behind it consolidated power. This ended a nascent civilian rule and set a precedent that would be repeated many times thereafter, with one military coup after another conditioning the country into becoming prey for the Israeli forces that arrived in 1967, occupied the Golan Heights, and destroyed my ancestral home, the lost place, of Quneitra.”

Film scholar Samirah Alkassim, who will be joining us for a remote Q&A after the December 15 screening, describes The Night as “a puzzle with a composite protagonist fused between the characters of the mother, son, and father. The real protagonist, however, is the process of memory configured through the overlapping recollections between a son and mother of the father who died mysteriously in the expropriation of their city, Quneitra. It is as if the characters are in a loop, sifting through fragments of the past to reassemble the picture and find themselves again.”