Hoop En Wanhoop In Het Midden-Oosten

Storyline

While current events in the Middle East frequently make the news, the average Western public has hardly any knowledge of the historical background. By showing the dreams, ambitions and frustrations of the people in the region, we hope to bring the Middle East closer to the viewers, to nuance simple images, and to invoke more understanding. The product concentrates around key periods in the 20th century: the Arab Revolt in 1916 and the following decade of the twenties with the splitting of the Middle-East dominated by Western countries, the thirties and forties and the Arab resistance against the Zionist claim on territory in the Middle East, ending in the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the fifties and sixties, the Suez crisis in 1956 and the broken dreams of pan-Arabism, and Saudi Arabia in the sixties and seventies, where we investigate the hope for Islam as an answer to persistent social, political, and economic predicaments in the Arabic world. The siege of the Gran Mosque in Mecca in 1979 by fundamentalist Muslims is the final result. With impressive archives, reputable experts, but mostly by collecting local stories, we hope to invoke and make tangible the great historical and emotional significance of the shifts in history. We focus not on just events, but on symbols of hope, despair, pride and frustration. Turning points that form part of the DNA of the population and play a role to this day. "I do not stir up the past, it stirs up itself," as an Egyptian poet says