Coming to VOD tomorrow, Tuesday, November 26: DINNER AT THE NO-GOS
Marco Orsini’s provocative exploration of politics and religion had its world premiere at Woodstock last year. It went on to screen at Thin Line and Sydney’s Lebanese Film Festival, as well as at a special IEFTA event in Monaco. The Orchard now makes the doc available on iTunes, Amazon, Google, and Netflix.
There are typically more than thirty countries listed on the US State Department’s Travel Warning list, a roster of those nations deemed too potentially dangerous or unstable for Americans to risk entering – from Syria and Egypt to Israel and Saudi Arabia. Questioning what impact such admonitions have on the ability of everyday people both in the US and in those forbidden nations to mutually understand one another, outside of political rhetoric and fear-mongering, director Orsini and producer Bilal Mekkaoui set out to challenge stereotypes and misunderstanding at the most direct level possible: by breaking bread in various Middle Eastern countries that have been on that list – including Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel – as well as in the UK and the US. Hosting a series of dinner parties – some with prominent attendees representing the elite of society, others with refugees from the seemingly perpetual conflict in the region – their only rule is that politics and religion must be discussed. Using the universal setting of a meal, these fascinating, charged conversations put a human face to diverse peoples all-too-easily dismissed en bloc by some as rabid anti-American extremists, while the American affair, held in Atlanta, manages to hold up a mirror to our own at times shockingly simplistic, if not dismissive, sense of geopolitics.
what (not) to doc 