Incubating talent

ISTANBUL – They say a good story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. This story has an excellent and dramatic beginning, a beginning so chaotic and fraught with danger that it almost put the middle’s very existence into jeopardy, let alone the ending.

I’ll introduce the characters straight away, because, as some say, a good story is first and foremost about people.

Fadi Hindash, 26, of Palestinian and Lebanese descent, is making a documentary film about hypocrisy in the Arab world so potentially explosive that he doesn’t want me to publish the location where he and his family have been living. Fair enough, almost no story is worth jeopardizing a person’s life. Besides showing, vividly and viscerally, that some Arabs are just as sexually and morally complex as Westerners, Hindash makes the point that in the Arab world, the feeling is that you can do whatever you want, but, you know, don’t talk about it. If you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist, and if these things (debauchery, homosexuality, prostitution, rape) don’t exist in your society, then you are free to judge and preach to others. Continue reading →