Tag - icarus films

Nasser’s Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt from Icarus Films is the latest title digitized by NJVID team this week. This video can now be licensed by any NJVID member for streaming access. More on this title:

• Nasser’s Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt (Icarus Films) – This title is the first film for an American audience about Gamal Abdel Nasser, one of the Arab world’s most transformative leaders. In 1952, as a unknown young Egyptian colonel, Nasser led a coup that became a revolution. Over the next 18 years he challenged Western hegemony abroad, confronted Islamism at

  home, and faced deep divisions among the Arabs, emerging as a titanic figure,

  

  champion of Arab progress and African liberation. But what he could not offer was democracy; instead, he established the region’s first and much emulated military authoritarian regime. A man of enormous charisma and ambition, Nasser became caught in the coils of his own power, dying at 52 with many dreams unrealized. The Arab Spring and its aftermath are his legacy. Fifteen years after completing her film Umm Kulthum, A Voice Like Egypt, director Michal Goldman returned to a very different Egypt to begin work on Nasser’s Republic, filmed between 2011 and 2015. During this period of turmoil, Egyptians argued passionately about their history as a way to see what course to follow in the future. It is their voices-peasants and professors, secularists and Islamists-that drive this film.

This week NJVID team has digitized and added new titles from the commercial video distributor – Icarus Films. The content includes topics such as role of women and art in Egypt’s political uprising, the story of Nobel prize winner – Gabriel García Márquez and more. These titles can now be licensed by any NJVID member for streaming access. The titles in this list are:

• Nefertiti’s Daughters – A story of women, art and revolution, this vibrant film documents the critical role that revolutionary street art played – and is continuing to play – in the political uprising of Egypt. Introducing a cadre of courageous and gifted female artists who are deeply involved in the struggle for social and political justice, Nefertiti’s Daughters illustrates the surprising ways that artwork, instead of being relegated to dusty museums and academia, can instead become a powerful tool in the ongoing fight for civil and human rights.

• Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez – How did a boy from a tiny town on the Caribbean coast become a writer who won the hearts of millions? How did he change our perception of reality with his work? The answers lie in the incredible story of Gabriel García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature. A law-school dropout and political journalist who grew up in the poverty and violence of northern Colombia, Gabriel García Márquez became the writer of globally celebrated, critically-acclaimed books including Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Known as “Gabo” to all of Latin America, Gabriel García Márquez’s sensual, “magical” sensibility leds him to the forefront of the political struggles of the 1970s and 1980s – including a pivotal and previously unknown role in negotiations between Cuban leader Fidel Castro and American President Bill Clinton – and into the hearts of readers across the world.

• Gringo Trails – Are tourists destroying the planet – or saving it? How do travelers change the remote places they visit, and how are they changed? From the Bolivian jungle to the party beaches of Thailand, and from the deserts of Timbuktu, Mali to the breathtaking beauty of Bhutan, Gringo Trails traces stories over the course of thirty years to show the dramatic long-term impact of tourism on cultures, economies, and the environment.

• Man for a Day – Performance artist and gender activist Diane Torr has appeared on stages around the world as a drag king, performing male characters and raising issues of gender and performativity. Now she holds workshops for other women in which they develop their own male characters and live as men for a day in an attempt to better understand the dynamics of gender in contemporary society. This film brings us inside Torr’s workshop in Berlin. The artist guides a group of open-minded women from diverse backgrounds – an Angolan single mother, an Israeli lesbian, a young German beauty queen, among others – through the theoretical underpinnings of her work, and helps them develop male characters of their own.