Mourad Ben Cheikh

Gérard Courant's "Filmed Diary" of December 14, 2011, produced in Dubai (United Arab Emirates). Between December 7 and 15, 2011, Gérard Courant was invited by the Dubai International Film Festival, in the United Arab Emirates. It was an opportunity for him to film many "Cinematons" of personalities from the Arab world and to continue his "Film Notebooks" from which he brought back 7 episodes.

The sole pleasure of Ala, a literature professor and poetry lover, is to share drunkenness with poets. «The Epistle of Mercy», a work about Heaven and Hell, written nearly a thousand years ago, is the subject of the day. In his inebriation, the waitress and bar owner become characters from this work.

A projection towards antiquity, to go back to the origins of the alphabet, to discover the supports of ancient writings, to find Esculape, the divinity of medicine in Greece and his alter ego Eshmoun in Carthage, Dionysos, the god of wine and theater in Athens and its alter ego Bacchus in Rome, see Athenaeum and introduce us to the centuries-old tradition of the olive tree and oil...? To see closely life in the ancient Mediterranean in Carthage, Rome, Athens or Alexandria, we realize that several details of everyday life hardly differed from what we live today.

The sole pleasure of Ala, a literature professor and poetry lover, is to share drunkenness with poets. «The Epistle of Mercy», a work about Heaven and Hell, written nearly a thousand years ago, is the subject of the day. In his inebriation, the waitress and bar owner become characters from this work.

Ali Raïs is a pirate armed by the Bey of Tunis. In the year 124, his fleet was arrested by the Marquis of Santa Cruz and he found himself a prisoner, with his six hundred men in Palermo. Italian witnesses will recognize him and denounce him to the Inquisition as a renegade, an indictment which is liable to the stake. Ali seeks to influence the course of the trial, he denies ever having been a Christian and proclaims himself a Muslim, the son of a Muslim. A long game of failure takes place between the court and the prisoner, he alternately tries to speed up or slow down the course of the trial depending on the nature of the information and testimony available to the inquisitors. We believe we are witnessing a modern trial where the shots alternate according to the investigations. This story of Ali Raïs was however not invented, the character is real and all the facts are recorded in a handwritten account of the hearings of the court of the inquisition.

Ali Raïs is a pirate armed by the Bey of Tunis. In the year 124, his fleet was arrested by the Marquis of Santa Cruz and he found himself a prisoner, with his six hundred men in Palermo. Italian witnesses will recognize him and denounce him to the Inquisition as a renegade, an indictment which is liable to the stake. Ali seeks to influence the course of the trial, he denies ever having been a Christian and proclaims himself a Muslim, the son of a Muslim. A long game of failure takes place between the court and the prisoner, he alternately tries to speed up or slow down the course of the trial depending on the nature of the information and testimony available to the inquisitors. We believe we are witnessing a modern trial where the shots alternate according to the investigations. This story of Ali Raïs was however not invented, the character is real and all the facts are recorded in a handwritten account of the hearings of the court of the inquisition.

The sole pleasure of Ala, a literature professor and poetry lover, is to share drunkenness with poets. «The Epistle of Mercy», a work about Heaven and Hell, written nearly a thousand years ago, is the subject of the day. In his inebriation, the waitress and bar owner become characters from this work.

A projection towards antiquity, to go back to the origins of the alphabet, to discover the supports of ancient writings, to find Esculape, the divinity of medicine in Greece and his alter ego Eshmoun in Carthage, Dionysos, the god of wine and theater in Athens and its alter ego Bacchus in Rome, see Athenaeum and introduce us to the centuries-old tradition of the olive tree and oil...? To see closely life in the ancient Mediterranean in Carthage, Rome, Athens or Alexandria, we realize that several details of everyday life hardly differed from what we live today.

A projection towards antiquity, to go back to the origins of the alphabet, to discover the supports of ancient writings, to find Esculape, the divinity of medicine in Greece and his alter ego Eshmoun in Carthage, Dionysos, the god of wine and theater in Athens and its alter ego Bacchus in Rome, see Athenaeum and introduce us to the centuries-old tradition of the olive tree and oil...? To see closely life in the ancient Mediterranean in Carthage, Rome, Athens or Alexandria, we realize that several details of everyday life hardly differed from what we live today.

A projection towards antiquity, to go back to the origins of the alphabet, to discover the supports of ancient writings, to find Esculape, the divinity of medicine in Greece and his alter ego Eshmoun in Carthage, Dionysos, the god of wine and theater in Athens and its alter ego Bacchus in Rome, see Athenaeum and introduce us to the centuries-old tradition of the olive tree and oil...? To see closely life in the ancient Mediterranean in Carthage, Rome, Athens or Alexandria, we realize that several details of everyday life hardly differed from what we live today.