The San Diego Arab Film Festival is in its eighth year and brings with it films from countries like Tunisia, Algeria, Syria and Jordan.

The films tell the stories of universal experiences — like family tension and growing older — but also take viewers to faraway settings like the West Bank and the streets of Cairo.


It runs through Sunday, and we went to the opening night at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park to see a film and talk to some of the people involved.

There we met Larry Christian, the president of an organization called Karama, which organizes the festival. It’s a local non-profit with a goal of promoting understanding of the issues of the Arab and Islamic world.

“We want, and we think that people will get an enhanced appreciation for the creativity or Arab culture, the humanity of people who both make are and are portrayed in art, and that that will humanize, put faces on these people,” he said in an interview with The Conversation podcast.

For a closer look at the festival, we zeroed in on one film, “10 Days Before the Wedding.” We spoke with a filmmaker, Amr Gamal, who flew in on a special visa from Yemen to present the film on opening night.


“10 Days Before the Wedding” portrays modern day Yemen and the post-war obstacles that stand in the way of a couple trying to get married in the port city of Aden.

“It was a responsibility I took to capture the daily life and what happened to the city after the war,” Gamal said. “And also, I tried in this movie to document the lifestyle, the clothes, the food, the streets, what was ruined or destroyed in the war. I felt like, no one is doing movies in our city, and movies are like a memory for a nation. So people after a few years, or maybe more than a few, will come back to watch this movies and say for their children, ‘Look how your city looked in this time.’”

We talked to the director, who detailed the challenges he faced getting this film made and what the world can learn about Yemen from this story.

“They will know how hard the daily life is in Yemen,” he said. “And also I wanted to make the world see how people are strong, even if they’re in a depressed situation — how they try to overcome, how the Yemeni women are strong also ... and how, even if you cannot achieve small dreams, at the end, you should do your best to make life go on.”

Listen to the full podcast episode here.