Grandma, A Thousand Times (Teta, Alf Marra)
Arab Film Competition - Doha Tribecca Film Festival 2010
Mahmoud Kaabour / Feature Documentary / United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Lebanon / 2010 / 48 min / Color / HDCAM / In Arabic, English / English, Arabic subtitles / World Premiere
Rated: General Audiences. Suitable for ages 4 and up.
Synopsis
"Grandma, A Thousand Times" puts a feisty Beiruti grandmother at the center of brave film exercises designed to commemorate her many worlds before they are erased by the passage of time and her eventual death.
Teta Fatima is the 83-year old matriarch of the Kaabour family and the sharp-witted queen bee of an old Beiruti quarter. With great intimacy, the film documents her larger-than-life character as she struggles to cope with the silence of her once-buzzing house and imagines what awaits her beyond death. Meanwhile, her beloved violinist husband (deceased 20 years) is both an essential absence and presence. His features manifest through the face of their filmmaker grandson while his previously unpublished violin improvisations weave through her world and that of the film.
"Grandma, A Thousand Times" brings together grandfather, grandmother, and grandson in a playful magic-realist documentary that aims to defy a past death and a future one.
About the Director
Mahmoud Kaabour
Born in 1979 and raised in Beirut, Kaabour graduated from the Mel Oppenheim School of Cinema and worked at the National Film Board of Canada and the CBC newsroom. His short film "Being Osama" received four international awards and made him the youngest commissioned filmmaker in Canadian television.
Credits
- Director
- Mahmoud Kaabour
- Director of Photography
- Muriel Aboulrouss
- Executive Producer
- Eva Star Sayre
- Music
- Nabil Amarshi
- Cast
- Teta Fatima Kaabour