Tag: reviews

  • Music Conductor Hussien Janmohamed Brings Together a Healing Collaboration During Turbulent Times

    Dr. Hussein Janmohamed  Creator Vincent L. Chan

    by Imtiaz Popat

    In a time of war and hate that we are experiencing, Dr. Hussein Janmohamed  who is an music conductor and instructor at Capilano University  is bringing people together, creating a healing space through music in conversation across time and space at a collaborative performance on Saturday evening April 11th at the 7:30 pm at the Blueshore CAPU Theatre at 2055 Purcell Way in North Vancouver.

    CAPU Coral Ensemble and Campus Choir will be joined with featured musicians Sunny Matharu on tabla, Saina Khaledi on santoor, Shruti Ramani on vocals Marina Hasselberg on cello Edmund Lau Sing,  Zane Labrador,  and Dasha Alcantara on piano.

    The audience will be asked sing as well. “We blur the line between listeners and music makers asking,” says Dr. Janmohamed  “Now that we are in the same room, all our voices here under one breath, what might we feel, know, find and make together for a better future for all?”

    “When our unique identities can comingle and alchemically enrich each other, how do we come to listen differently? What might we learn? And, how would we combine the best of knowledge from diverse ways of knowing (and being) to make something better for everyone?”

    “If sonic interplay can help us to listen differently, breathe unitedly, and sing harmoniously in a theatre for a couple of hours, could take those lessons into life? What would it take to humbly fine tune our hearts so we could work work together on what we are FOR and not who we are AGAINST?”

    “Especially in these turbulent times, we look forward to dwelling in this living musical conversation with you.” This unique collaborative performance will bring different musical traditions together to heal our soul. Tickets: https://lnkd.in/ggnurHpU

  • Ahmed Moneka Arabic Jazz Ensemble

    by Imtiaz Popat

    Drawing on his Afro-Arabic heritage, Moneka fuses African music and Arabic folk rhythms with funk, soul, and jazz influences. His engaging performances reflect his journey from Baghdad to Canada as a refugee and celebrate love, resilience, and cultural connection through original music and Middle Eastern classics. His has a profound knowledge of the African and Arabic culture that thrived in the Swahili Coast as result of trade of not just fabric, food, spices but of music and culture.   His Juno-nominated album Kanzafula is the first Canadian-Iraqi recording to receive a Juno nomination. A Dora Award and Stingray Rising Star Award recipient, Moneka continues to build bridges across cultures through music, storytelling, and collaboration. Joined by an exceptional international ensemble, Moneka promises an electrifying evening of global sounds and joyful celebration. Hosted by the Rogue Folk Club, in co-production with Caravan World Rhythms, presents Juno-nominated Iraqi-Canadian artist Ahmed Moneka live in concert with the Ahmed Moneka Arabic Jazz Ensemble on March 27 at 8:00 pm at Mel Lehan Hall at St. James Community Square 3214 West 10th Avenue.      

  • Review: President’s Cake is reminiscent of the Gulf War against Iraq

    by Imtiaz Popat

    The President’s Cake (Mamlaket al-Qasab) is a surreal vivid story set in before the Gulf War against Iraq, it comes out in on back drop of the anther Gulf war, this one against Iran. New York-based writer/director Hasan Hadi draws on his own childhood in 1990s Iraq under the regime of President Saddam Hussein.  At the time, the country faced UN-backed sanctions, leading to extreme poverty and food shortages.  Saddam still required all Iraqis to celebrate his birthday.

    To live in 1990s Iraq was to live in Saddam Hussein’s shadow, his image plastered onto walls across the city and his name drilled into the psyches of children. He scripted himself as a savior to a country hollowed out by the Gulf war. This is the Iraq first-time filmmaker Hasan Hadi remembers growing up in, a snapshot seen through the eyes of nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) whois tasked with providing a nice President’s birthday cake for her school class. 

    Along with her pet rooster Hindi, her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) and a classmate Waheed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), Lamia ends up in the city, looking for ingredients like flour, sugar and eggs, even if it means selling her late father’s heirloom watch.  But it turns out that Lamia’s grandmother is in the city for another reason. 

    The film was shot in Iraq in real historical locations, including the Mesopotamian marshes (believed to be the birthplace of civilization), where people still live as they did thousands of years ago, paddling by canoe to get around.  In the city, a restaurant scene actually takes
    place at the restaurant where Saddam used to eat when he was young.

    Lamia’s odyssey begins with an assignment that feels deceptively simple: She is charged by her ex-soldier schoolteacher to bake a cake in honor of the president’s birthday. It’s evident that the task is truly a test of obedience. One of the first scenes of the film features schoolchildren, including Lamia, chanting, “With our blood and our souls, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam!” beneath the sound of fighter jets. Hadi carefully stages this atmosphere of mounting tension, where baking a cake is haunted by the quiet terror of getting it wrong. 

    The President’s Cake is carried by the remarkable performances of its predominantly amateur cast, especially its child actors. Nayyef and Qasem convey how children adjust to the environments they live in as their characters traverse and adapt to their fractured home. The pair’s overwhelming frustrations are also punctuated by moments of joy, from a staring contest to Nayyef dancing with a cafe singer.  

    At times, the odyssey leans on a fairy-tale chain of coincidences, but what lingers is its fidelity to lived experience. Hadi conveys the blunt, unvarnished realities of everyday life, particular under immense pressure. The director channels his childhood to comment on issues that are no less familiar today: power, patriarchy, poverty, and most of all, the damages of war.

    Coming out during Ramadhan and with back drop of another Gulf War, the filmography is very vivid and is really worth watching on the big screen at this time during the Oscar award season. The film won both the Caméra d’Or (best first feature) and the Directors’ Fortnight
    Audience Award at Cannes 2025.

    The film is in Arabic with English subtitles. The President’s Cake is being released in Canada by Mongrel Media.

  • Review: ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ tells a story of Gaza

    Motaz Malhees in “The Voice of Hind Rajab.”© Willa

    The Voice of Hind Rajab is a dramatization and visualization sound files of the Voice of Hind Rajab during phone conversations at a Red Cresent call centre from a car caught in a brutal Israeli attack in Gaza.  

    A call comes into Omar’s call centre line, a woman screaming, “They are shooting at us!” A hail of fire. The call ends. Omar soon learns that a 6-year-old girl is still alive in the car.

    Hind is not just trapped in the car — she’s trapped in time, in history, in headlines, in the audio that materializes on-screen like a line of digital razor wire and charges the film with an unceasing current of emotional voltage.

    The film’s final turn is once the recording runs out and Hind’s voice can no longer be heard strips away all narrative padding and grants her mother a place to memorialize her grief. This time, the view of the horizon and sea is clear.

    This isn’t filmmaker Ben Hania’s first time refracting reality through the lens of performance: In the Oscar-nominated experimental 2023 documentary Four Daughters, she integrated actors into the household of a Tunisian mother and her two youngest daughters to play her missing eldest two daughters, who left to join Daesh fighters in Libya. The film tells a multidimensional story of loss, where memory is both honored and exposed as futile.

    The film has won a number of film festival awards and It has been selected as the Tunisian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, making the December shortlist. At the 83rd Golden Globe Awards, it was nominated for Best Non-English Language Film.