Later in the program, we will hear from Iraqi filmaker Oday Rasheed. His beautifully shot feature film “Qarantina“, captures life in the post occupation Iraq, he portrays relationships among his film’s five characters. Shahram Aghamir interviewed him while he was visiting for his residence at the San Francisco Film Society.
This week on Voices of the Middle East & North Africa, we have a conversation with Kamran Ali, an associate professor of anthropology and acting director of the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Ali talks about the political landscape in Pakistan in the midst of a flood that’s left thousands dead and over one and half million people homeless.
Later in the program, we’ll bring you the first of two part conversation with Iraqi film maker Mohamed Al-Daradji about his award winning feature film Ibne Babel, or Son of Babylon, a story about a grandmother and grandson in occupied Iraq. Al-Daradji speaks with us about the state of the film industry in Iraq. And how he’s received numerous death threats – and has even been kidnapped – because of the movies he’s produced.
This week on Voices of the Middle East and North Africa, Khalil Bendib speaks with Director of the Institute of Jerusalem Studies and Birzeit University Professor of sociology Salim Tamari about an essay published in the Jerusalem quarterly titled “Jerusalem’s Ottoman modernity,” in which he depicts a very different Jerusalem around the turn of the 20th century than the one we are familiar with today.
Later in the program, Malihe Razazan speaks with Hadani Ditmars, a co-editor of New Internationalist, who went to Iraq in February of this year to explore whatever is left of the art in post-invasion Iraq.
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Voices of the Middle East and North Africa has a conversation with Professor. Pete Moore of Case Western University about the political economy of Iraq. Tunisian filmmakers Kalthoum Bornaz speaks about her film, “The Other Half of the Sky.”
In this week’s program, we mark the 6th anniversary of the full-scale invasion and occupation of Iraq. Shahram Aghamir speaks to independent journalist Dahr Jamail and Nabil Al-Takriti, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mary Washington.
charshanbeh suri
Later in the program, Sanaz Meshkinpour and Shuka Kalantari take us through the tradition of NoRouz that starts at the exact moment of the vernal equinox, when the sun crosses the equator and winter ends. Scroll to the bottom of the page to for a short video of the event, produced by Kiazad Ehya.
Also in the program, Khalil Bendib has a commentary on the International Court of Justice indictment against Sudan’s President, Omar al-Bashir for alleged war crimes.
Voices of the Middle East and North Africa – Occupation of Iraq, 6 years later; NoRouz, the new year – March 18, 2009 at 7:00pm
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The Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus was a rare bird: a formal innovator immersed in tradition, a politically engaged artist who resisted political classification.Sinan Antoon looks back on his life and work.
“What words can do / these days / Is almost nothing” wrote the Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus in The Secret of Words, published just weeks after he died in a Berlin hospital on October 21, 2007.
Boulus always modestly undersold the power his work had in Iraqi and Arab cultural circles. One wishes he could have seen the elegies and testimonials that quickly flowed in from Iraq, from Morocco, from across the Arab diaspora. In As Safir, the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef bemoaned the loss of “the only Iraqi poet”.
March 18th, 2008
