Film reviews: Cairo Time and Tehroun

It's Film Festival time in Munich, which means over here we get to see films on the big screen that otherwise take a year or more to reach us if they don't end up directly on tv during ungodly hours anyway. And there is a big audience for them. Case in point: yesterday, when I saw the first of the films I'm quickly reviewing in here, it wasn't only a sunny, hot Sunday afternoon but also the Germany versus England World Cup game. Yoiu couldn't wish for worse odds. And yet the cinema, showing a film with no big names (at least for a German audience) by a Canadian-Arab director, was packed. (Walking home afterwards in the game aftermath was something, though. It wasn't hard to deduce we'd won, what with the traffic having completetely stopped and everyone cheering on the road. *g*) Okay, back to the films I watched, yesterday and this morning, which only have one thing in common, other than that they're named after the capitals they take place in: their directors are in a sort-of-but-not-really between worlds position, being Arab Canadian and an Iranian living in France respectively. Oh, and they were both, in very different ways, immensely watchable.

( Cairo Time )

( Tehroun )