Hala Elkoussy, East of Noon, 2024 Screening in the presence of the artist

The NMNM and the Institut audiovisuel de Monaco have chosen to collaborate by programming creations of artists whose practice stands in between cinema and contemporary art : films that are singular by their from, their narrative system, but also their production and diffusion mode. For this season, the Institut audiovisuel de Monaco’s Tout l’art du cinéma programme presents Hala Elkoussy’s East of Noon.

Opening the evening, Hala Elkoussy will present her work as a filmmaker and visual artist.

Sharq 12 – Netherlands, Egypt, Qatar, 2024, b/w, color, 109 min. vostf.
Director and screenplay: Hala Elkoussy. Cinematography: Abdelsalam Moussa. Sound: Abdalrahman Mahmoud, Jaim Sahuleka. Sets: Hala Elkoussy. Original music: Ahmad Elsawy. Editing: Bobbie Roelofs, Hala Elkoussy. Production: Vriza productions, seriousFilm, Nu’ta Films. Starring : Ahmed Kamal (Shawky the Showman), Menha El Batroui (Jalala), Omar Rozeik (Abdo), Fayza Shama (Nunna).

Young Abdo uses his music to revolt against his elders, in a confined, timeless land ruled by a tyrant, Shawky, an eccentric jester who rules the world with a mixture of spectacle and terror. The storyteller of this fable, Jalala, relieves men’s pain with stories of the sea and freedom that no one has ever known.

With East of Noon, Hala Elkoussy takes us into a popular tale that oscillates between The Thousand and One Nights and Ubu Roi, […] where marvelous young people try to survive the autocracy of an infantile tyrant. Hala Elkoussy’s second feature, with its unusual, whimsical and eccentric form, stands out in African and Arab cinema, reminiscent of the classics of the 60s and 70s.

After studying at the American University in Cairo, where she was born in 1974, and obtaining a Master’s degree from Goldsmith College in London in 2002, Hala Elkoussy made a name for herself in the field of photography, producing several short films that were shown in contemporary art venues around the world, including the Istanbul Biennial, the Tate Modern and the Centre Georges Pompidou. In 2004, she founded a collective of visual artists, and two years later took up a residency at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. In 2013, Elkoussy published a photographic diary on urban life after the Egyptian Revolution. His first feature film, Cactus Flower, which had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2017, continues this work of topography, focusing on the lives of two women trying to survive in a Cairo city on the brink of collapse. Like a cactus flower, at once hostile and seductive, the city plays a central role in the construction of the film, not to say that it plays the leading role, as the two heroines only manage to overcome their daily lives and their distress by taking refuge in their imagination, materialized by musical interludes, sung or danced, in the great tradition of Egyptian cinema. At the heart of this film is a great actress of Arab cinema, Menha El-Batrawi, who also starred in Hala Elkoussy’s second feature, East of Noon (2024), presented in the Quinzaine at the last Cannes Film Festival. The action of this film-fable takes place in a fantasized Egypt, where the characters, struggling against a tyrannical power, owe their freedom only to their ability to invent roles and stories for themselves, and to literally throw themselves into the water, since the sea here represents a possible elsewhere. Full of oppositions and contrasts, the film doesn’t hesitate to explore the extravagances of reality, the twists and turns of desire, the tricks of truth, guided in its most successful moments by an irrepressible drive for life that recalls certain accents of Youssef Chahine’s cinema. All the more reason to follow this artist’s cinematic trajectory.

Théâtre des Variétés, 1 bd. Albert Ier

Billetterie sur place le soir de la projection.
Tarifs : 6 €
Etudiants et moins de 21 ans : 3 €

Parking : Condamine
Bus : Place d’Armes ou Stade nautique