Nabil Maleh
Nabil Maleh was a Syrian film director, screenwriter, producer, painter and poet; he is thought to be a father of Syrian cinema.
Nabil has published more than 1,000 articles, short stories, essays and poems. He is the writer and director of 120 short, experimental and documentary works and 12 feature-length films including The Extras and The Leopard. He has more than 60 awards at international film festivals, including several lifetime achievement awards. Several of his films are in the curriculum of international film schools, and he has taught film direction, acting, writing and aesthetics at many universities, centers and associations, including the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California in Los Angeles.
Early life
Maleh was born into an upper middle class Damascus family. When Nabil was 14 years old, he used to write political articles for local newspapers. Later at 16 years, he went to Czech Republic to study nuclear physics. However, he immediately fell in love with the film industry when he was asked to be an extra in a film; so he went to study in Prague Film School, whose students then included Miloš Forman and Jiri Menzel. While a student he worked at the Arab Radio Transmission, an Arabic language Czech station aimed at the Middle East. Nabil's school years were full of cultural inspiration: “In addition to the technical side and high artistic standards, FAMU created and developed a very sophisticated cultural base for the filmmaker. Culture was a part of daily life—a daily event—a new book, play, concert, an engaging debate. And everything was accessible. It is the only place I found where culture was free of charge. I lived for one month in Prague for what a concert with bad seats would have cost in Paris.”He finished school and returned home in 1964, but in a year he went abroad again.
Director's career
After graduation in 1964 and returning to Syria, Maleh was proclaimed as the first European film graduate in his native country. He was invited to a new established National Film Organization in order to control and direct one of the organization's first feature films. Maleh wrote a scenario based on Syrian author Haydar Haydar’s novel The Leopard. A week before shooting was scheduled to begin, the Ministry of Interior banned the film from being shown. Only in 1971 was the film released in rent and Maleh became popular. “The Leopard” had a big success and introduced Syrian cinema to the global stage. Maleh shot many films about war in Palestine and Vietnam. The film Labor was banned in Syria because it had a negative portrayal of a government figure. In 1979 Maleh's second film Fragments was released. Despite the film's success, the director's relationship with the Syrian government went downhill. He left Syria for the United States, where he taught film production at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Los Angeles on a Fulbright Grant. He spent the next 10 years in Europe, mostly in Greece, continuing to write. In 1992, Syria's National Film Organization invited him back to direct the film in Damascus to direct his next major work, The Extras.With his production company Ebla — named for a Bronze Age fount of Syrian civilization — Maleh produced several documentaries for foreign markets, including A Bedouin Day, narrated in English and distributed in Europe by a British company.
Continuing to write, he produced a screenplay, a political thriller about an escaped Iraqi official hiding among tourists in Lebanon. The film Hunt Feast was shot in 2005 as a Syrian-British joint venture, but remains locked in a legal battle. The following year the Dubai International Film Festival honored Maleh, along with American director Oliver Stone and Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, for his outstanding contribution to cinema.