TribecaFilm.com | Blogs | Watch: Marina of the Zabbaleen

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September 08, 2009 07:00PM EDT

Watch: Marina of the Zabbaleen

This week, Torch Films is releasing Marína of the Zabbaleen, a cinematic documentary feature that premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival to sold-out screenings and a strong audience reaction. Egyptian-born director Engi Wassef received support from the Tribeca All Access program and the youngest female director ever to have a feature in the Festival.

The film explores the world of seven-year-old Marína in the Muqqattam garbage recycling village in Cairo, Egypt. An impressionistic portrait of childhood and family, the film also tells the story of the resourceful Zabbaleen, a Coptic Christian community of recyclers whose entrepreneurial waste management system produces the highest recycling rate in the world. No people has felt the ramifications of the Swine Influenza pandemic more acutely than the Zabbaleen, whose way of life was devastated by the government-ordered eradication of the country’s pig population earlier this spring.

Marina of the Zabbaleen will screen in New York from September 11-17 at the ImaginAsian Theater, and in LA from September 16-22 at the Laemmle Grande. (Engagements in other cities will be announced soon.) The film is being released simultaneously on DVD, and is the first feature film to utilize the greenest technology available, the Flex DVD.

Torch Films, a global feature film financing, production, and distribution company founded in 2008, is allocating 10% of gross retail sales revenues of the film to help the Zabbaleen survive their current dislocation and reach sustainability once more.