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It was a problem of preparing for the worst, and then the worst got worse. 

Last fall when the Cinemayaat – Arab Film Festival screened at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco, there were concerns about security problems stemming from Israeli-Palestinian tensions. The festival was scheduled to come to Berkeley beginning Sept. 12 but was cancelled as the unexpected attacks hit and America’s attention suddenly narrowed on one fugitive Arab figure in particular. 

Since then, America’s relations with Arab nations have become the focus of unrelenting media attention. Cinemayaat, programmed last summer, is popping up now in a very different world, post-9/11. We’ve learned more about Afghanistan’s tribal politics then we had ever thought we would need in the past. As Berkeley staged prayer vigils and Rep. Barbara Lee voted against giving presidential carte blanche to ride into Afghanistan like a cowboy posse, our fear, anger, and sorrow mixed with computer-graphic diagrams of tunnel warfare and a pixilated video images of the enemy Osama bin Laden dispatched from an undisclosed location.  

Once the festival might have been a window onto different cultures and political imperatives, and now functions as a collection of films allowing us to ponder America’s perceptions of and reactions to the Arab world. 

The festival even offers a set of tools with which to do this. "Derrida’s Elsewhere" (Sat. 1:15 PM) is a documentary, of sorts – really a platform upon which its subject, philosopher Jacques Derrida, can espouse ideas – wherein he applies Deconstruction ideologies to himself and to his environment. The principle founder of Deconstructive thinking – a textual strategy usually applied to literature but can be expanded to other pursuits which analyses the way a text comments on itself through language – was raised in Algeria under French colonial rule. He says he has been figuratively (and doubtlessly literally) circumcised by the particulars of his own history, and the film implies his thinking and writing have been marked by the spatial and cultural remove of a colony from its ruler.  

Writing and, by extension, language, says Derrida, must come from crossing a frontier. The "elsewhere" of the film’s title refers to his interior or intellectual landscape that requires a tension – a boundary to be crossed. He insists this internal frontier cannot be a completely foreign boundary, because "if it were elsewhere, it wouldn’t be elsewhere." 

This kind of seemingly circular thinking runs through "Derrida’s Elsewhere" and can be very frustrating to the uninitiated. Indeed, the film assumes its viewers are already familiar, however perfunctorily, with Derrida. Watching the man run on and on about philosophical ideas, one might wonder if this film wouldn’t be better suited as a written article. 

But filmmaker Safaa Fathy has exploited her visual media by placing Derrida in physical environments and documented his reaction. In a mosque he responds to the transitory nature of site-specific worship; the Algerian synagogue he went to as a child was once a mosque, which became, in turn, a mosque again after colonial independence. In front of an aquarium exhibit he ponders something he cannot know: the way the fish placidly floating in the tank perceive time. Whenever he stared eye to eye with an animal, he says, he is struck by the tension of close proximity and infinite distance between.  

It isn’t too great a leap to recognize in us a similar fascination with the Taliban soldier from Marin County, John Walker. 

Derrida’s methods turning around the elements of text or media or politics to complicate matters is meant to arrive at a multifaceted understanding of phenomena, and the film takes a similarly inconclusive tack. Another documentary in the festival takes a very different approach to its thesis. "Invisible War: Depleted Uranium and the Politics of Radiation" (Fri. 7PM) is a more conventional documentary with a clear agenda. 

During the Gulf War in Iraq, American soldiers used ammunition made of depleted Uranium, an unnatural by-product of nuclear processing that is not nearly as radioactive as the type of Uranium used in nuclear reactions. It is very dense, moreso than iron or lead, which makes it useful as ammunition designed to pierce armor and make minced meat of tank turrets in spectacular displays of destruction (which the film delivers in richly colored video images – melted corpses and all). 

The problem with depleted Uranium is that it is somewhat radioactive. How benign or how dangerous depends on who you talk to: U.S. Army officials defending the use of their fantastically efficient weapons or doctors and Army veteran advocates reporting illness and birth defects associated with patients’ proximity to the weapons. The film clearly distrusts the men in uniform. 

Using photo stills and video imagery as exhibits of visual evidence, the documentary shows how a depleted Uranium artillery shell vaporizes upon impact, and the dust of UD settles on whatever, and whomever, is nearby including U.S. soldiers on patrol and local children snooping through the wreckage. 

The film sets out to uncover the U.S. Army’s deceit and negligence not only to the countries it invades but to it’s own soldiers. It divides its screen time with the "Gulf War Syndrome" radiation illnesses the soldiers brought home from the front and passed onto their newly conceived children, and children’s hospitals in Iraq where horribly disfigured children – some simulataneously shriveled and bloated – lie in beds waiting to die. The film features a seemingly endless montage of medical grotesqueries to emphatically make its point.  

By turning the actions of the U.S. on foreign soil into an angry indictment on America, "Invisible War" uses an Iraqi situation to comment on America. Another documentary in the festival, "The Dream" (Sat. 3PM), is a Palestinian film about homegrown morbidity seeded in the subconscious of Palestinians in Lebanon. This was shot before the Isreali invasion in 1982, and here is a generation of Palestinians who have been born and raised in violent tension where "martyrs" are common in many families. "The Dream" is a document of their dreams. 

A boy dreams of an air raid and being shot in the chest. A young woman dreams of being beaten in a prison. A young man sees a vegetable market bombed and the strawberry man "in pieces." Casually interviewed in their homes, kitchens, and bedrooms, the subjects of the film recount subconscious visions of surprise meetings with martyred loved ones, or running into heads of state. 

The interviews are spaced with buffers of music, singing about desolation and hopelessness. We also see images of a slaughterhouse, and a morgue, and a printing press cranking out posters of the mourned. Death, the film is saying in it’s loose, impressionistic way, is the way of life for many Palestinians.