When Audrey Hepburn was first cast as Holly Golightly in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Truman Capote, the author of the novel, was utterly disheartened. Capote said that it made him “want to throw up,” and that Marilyn Monroe had been his first choice. At a time when Hollywood idolized sex symbols such as
In ‘Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity,’ Egyptian film historian Viola Shafik describes Palestinian cinema as a “national cinema without homeland” – a designation owed to the fact that most of the country’s practitioners live in diaspora, rely on foreign funding, and are barred from showing their films in the Occupied Territories. And yet, through