Ramallah - Ma’an - “My country is a country of films,” said director of the Cannes International Film Festival Thierry Frémaux addressing Palestinian artists and film directors at the fourth Al-Kasaba International Film Fest in Ramallah on Thursday.

It was the gaps between the modern film world and the realities of festival hosts that occupied the 25-minute long session - Frémaux, like the films, had to deal with real world Qalandiya traffic and airport delays so the talk was nearly canceled.

Curious directors dove in to a discussion about a recent concern plaguing international film festivals: how do they categorize foreign films into their various countries, particularly when controversy or ambiguity arises?

Among those cited was Palestinian director Elia Sulaiman, whose films have been categorized as French and Palestinian, though he holds an Israeli passport, as were Taiwanese films criticized by the government of China, and Austrian directors who produce distinctly French and German films.

So, how do you define it?

“I define it and I change my mind regarding each situation,” Frémaux explains. “The French government leaves us free and independent,” to make decisions on film, he says. “We want to keep that freedom, because maybe Elia Sulaiman, who lives part of the time in Paris, will one day make a pure French film, with French actors, French language, French money, a French screenplay, then maybe it can’t be considered as a Palestinian film.”

So while Cannes struggles between the tradition of categorizing films by country and traditions of hoisting a flag from each state represented, Palestinian filmmakers wondered how their own works would be classified. They were reassured, “If a film is good - it is good,” Frémaux said, “Cannes is totally independent; we do what we want to do.”

The freedom of film, of melting lines between documentary and fictional films, the opportunity to share art and images from around the world, were themes embodied in the 2009 Al-Kasaba festival.

Recapping some of the cinema magic of the preceding two weeks, the night's hostess reminded moviegoers that “we travelled to the US to taste the bitter pill of immigration” with the festival’s opener, Amreeka, and “from the US arrived Rachel Corrie, who met her fate in the land of Palestine,” from Tunisian filmmaker Yahya Barakat.

The festival brought 5,000 viewers to 73 screenings of 70 films from 25 nations. Its hosts made a point to invite international and particularly Arab artists and films to the festival. The symbol, on the artwork and posters advertizing the festival, was a stork, depicted bearing a cloth bundle that wraps up a film. In the one-minute promo ahead of each screening, the stork descended from the sky carrying its precious cargo, over walls and cities, delivering human cinematic expression to viewers in Ramallah. With a clear mandate to weave Ramallah into the fabric of world cinema, the closing ceremony included a call to “Arab artists to break the siege and visit Palestine.”

Sharazad, tell your story

The director of the closing film, Egypt’s Yousry Nasrallah, could not, however, be flown in by the festival stork for the screening of Sharazad, Tell Your Story (E7ki ya shaharazad).

He chose not to attend the festival and risk harassment by Israeli forces in control of the borders that might get him from Cairo to Ramallah. He spoke to the audience by phone, however, saying he looked forward to the day when he, and many other Arab filmmakers and artists, could come and participate in the festival.

Nasrallah’s striking and, at times, graphic film about women, sex, class and politics in Cairo - and the absence of its director - played well into the themes of the Al-Kasaba festival, and also highlighted some of the gaps outstanding between the idealism of film as its own country, and the realities of borders, restrictions and poor city planning in stifling the realization of artistic expression.

A review of Nasrallah’s film in the Daily News Egypt explained the film, as one that magnified the issues of modern Cairo “in a tightly controlled dramatic form, concluding with a strong statement neither direct nor preachy. There’s no uniformed message; just a stern picture of the reality of our times.”

In the film, a wealthy couple - Hebba a newsmagazine TV show host and Karim up for the position of editor-in-chief at a government paper - struggles with personal and social expectations when it came to love, family and their respective careers. Rebelling against Karim’s request that Hebba tone down the political angle of her show and avoid ruffling government feathers until he secured the promotion, the TV personality seeks out love stories to tell her audience.

Through the show, the stories of three women are sharply remembered. An aging singleton institutionalized a few years after publically refusing to marry a man who demanded too much for the so-called privilege of calling herself a wife, a vengeful sister who kills the man that swindled the three orphaned girls into sex and dishonor as they sought the protection of a man in a poor neighborhood, and a hoodwinked dentist, blackmailed and abandoned by the Government-official-fiancé who impregnates her. The stories of un-love uncover thinly veiled gender inequalities, the vulnerability of Egypt’s poor and the corruption of men in political positions.

The forth show stars Hebba herself, suddenly the bruised and bloody victim of domestic violence after her shows about love, marriage and their pursuit turn out to have ruffled political feathers after all.

“Nasrallah doesn’t look for reasons,” the Daily News review continues, “nor is he interested in the future implications of the crises at hand.” The film states as fact the tragedies of its woman in the same breath as it hails their strengths.

The film closes with a purple, swollen Hebba, in a gilded studio cutting to commercial after removing her night-time sunglasses to reveal a black eye. Her camera man, amid the silence of the studio audience asks the host if she is ok. “Great,” she replies, again into the silence, as the camera pans out with her story ready to be told.

And so it seems with the Al-Kasaba festival.

A statement, the good and the bad, without apologies for being under occupation and unable to offer what other festivals might. A festival, as Frémaux put it, “working and fighting for cinema, to give Cinema to the world, to the people.”