Grandma, a Thousand Times

With filmmaker Mahmoud Kaabour Q&A

Trailer Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpvOKewvlgs&feature=share

United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Lebanon, 2010
Director: Mahmoud Kaabour
Screenwriters: Mahmoud Kaabour, Fatima el Ghoul
Cinematographer: Muriel Aboulrouss
Editor: Patricia Heneine
Composer: Nabil Amarshi
Cast: Fatima el Ghoul, Mahmoud Kaabour
Running Time: 48 minutes

Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2010 Doha Tribeca Film Festival, Grandma, a Thousand Times (Teta, Alf Marra), is a poetic documentary that puts a feisty Beiruti grandmother at the center of brave film exercises concocted by her grandson to commemorate her many worlds before they are erased by the passage of time and her eventual death. With great intimacy, the film documents the larger-than-life character Teta Fatima, the 83-year-old matriarch of the Kaabour family, as she struggles to cope with the silence of her once-buzzing house and imagines what awaits her beyond death.

Resigned to Argileh smoking and daylong coffee drinking on a now-empty balcony, Teta now invokes the deepest memories of her violinist husband, who died 20 years prior. She claims a preparedness to reunite with him. The film brings together grandfather, grandmother and grandson in a magic-realist documentary that aims to defy a past death and a future one

E. Nina Rothe for the Huffington Post says; “It’s no wonder Grandma, a Thousand Times has melted hearts from Beirut, to Doha, to Rotterdam and now NYC. It is a cinematic love letter dedicated to a beloved woman, one that all who adore their grandparents wish they could have had the chance to write.”

Director Mahmoud Kaabour was born and raised in Beirut. Kaabour graduated from the Mel Oppenheim School of Cinema and worked at the National Film Board of Canada and the CBC Newsroom. His short film Being Osama received four international awards and made him the youngest commissioned filmmaker in Canadian television.

Note: Q&A discussion between filmmakers and audience adds approximately 30 minutes to running time.