مغامرات الأمير أحمد

Friday night, I had a very nice cinematic experience when I went to see The Adventures of Prince Ahmed with Hanna and two Danish girls working in the Palestinian refugee camp Ain al-Hilweh (the largest of Lebanon’s 12 camps). Unlike your usual visit to the movies, this was a cine-concert: a screening accompanied by live music. And a very nice one, indeed.

First, getting the cheapest tickets like we did turned out to be a good move since they put us in the very front: not ideal maybe for getting the perfect view of the screen, but excellent since we were close to the band and the live performance. The movie itself is a German film from 1926, all animated with the story being told through images, silhouettes on colorful backgrounds, and a few written sentences appearing now and then to let us know what the characters are saying and thinking. And, of course, through the music. I like the idea of mixing these two art forms, especially the letting a contemporary band put music to a film from 100 years back.

And the animation is just amazing. The film is based on themes from One Thousand and One Nights, so we get to meet familiar characters like Aladdin, a magic horse, the stereotyped Arabic sheik and your usual Oriental femmes fatales of course. Though in line with the Orientalist – that is, the idea that the Orient is antithetical and, consequentially, subordinate and inferior, to the West – image of the Arab world that so persuasively has shaped Europe’s ideas of the region for decades, the film is nevertheless very cute and a beautiful piece of art, and you should definitely see it if you get the chance.