Adonis’s Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is the central book of poems in modern Arabic literature. Published in 1961, its status in Arabic is comparable to The Waste Land in English or Duino Elegies in German. (Adonis collaborated on a translation of Eliot’s long poem while writing Mihyar). Like those works of European high modernism, Adonis’s collection is poetry of large and explicit ambitions. It evokes classical, Koranic, and Biblical sources on almost every page, even when announcing its own originality. It is a work of visionary exultation and powerful melancholy. It imagines a world of blight and barrenness and picks through the ruins for hints of resurrection.

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For many years, the Arab presence at the Cannes Film Festival has been predicable and tiresome. While the number of participating films has substantially increased, the all-too-familiar themes, subjects and forms remained unchanged. But this was not the case in 2019 - or at least not entirely.

This year, the independently run sidebars of the festival, known as Critics' Week and Directors' Fortnight, demonstrated a boldness and unpredictability - even frivolity – in their choice of films, which was absent from the official line-up, including the main competition.

This was especially obvious when it came to Arab productions. The official selection opted for the obvious. Critics' Week and Directors' Fortnight, on the other hand, selected a deliciously acerbic religious satire, a brilliantly opaque thriller, and possibly the most bonkers Arab picture that has been screened on the French Riviera.

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