Ajyal Film Festival 2023

All Films

Grandma, A Thousand Times (Teta, Alf Marra)

Arab Film Competition

Mahmoud Kaabour / Feature Documentary / United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Lebanon / 2010 / 48 min / Color / HDCAM
In Arabic, English / English, Arabic subtitles
Interests: About Family, Documentary, Dramedy
World Premiere

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 His features manifest through the face of their filmmaker grandson while his previously unpublished violin improvisations weave through her world and that of the film.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.

Official Film Website

About the Directors

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

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