Here’s a piece I wrote for the CBC on the Israeli movie The Band’s Visit. Beautiful film, superbly acted, and somehow (well, not somehow) banned from both the Cairo and Abu Dhabi film festivals. I had a lengthy chat with the head of the Abu Dhabi festival last year, and I had hoped that they would become a regional paragon of openess. There’s still a chance of that, given where Abu Dhabi is going in terms of developing itself as a cultural hub (what with incoming Guggenheims, Louvres, etc). But The Band’s Visit was the wrong film to snub.

When I was in Beirut, I had a couple of extensive chats with the ex-editor of The Middle East Broadcast Magazine, a thorough publication that dealt with the broad spectrum of the Middle Eastern media with none of the hysterics we’ve become used to. Habib Battah and I, most memorably, had one of those intricately blended juice concoctions served at Rotana Cafe, in Beirut’s soulless, rebuilt central district. (For an excellent summation of what happened here, take a look at this article.) Rotana is the region’s biggest video-clip channel, and Battah gave a fine breakdown of what the video-clip means in the Muslim world. And it’s not what you’d think.

Habib Battah, although he owns a clear-eyed sense of irony, is not a bitter or cynical man. Given the state of Lebanon today, that in itself is an achievement. But since leaving MEB, Battah has started a blog called The Beirut Report, which is an astonishing resource for anyone wanting insight into what it’s like to live in what Battah describes as a “civilized war zone.” I’d never quite thought of it in those terms before, but Johannesburg in the late eighties, in the waning years of Apartheid, was exactly that: a civilized war zone. The giveaway? Bomb detection equipment at upscale shopping malls.

Anyway, The Beirut Report is a must read, as are Battah’s contributions to Variety Magazine, helpfully linked on his site.