A promotional poster calls The Land, directed by Youssef Chahine and produced in 1969, the “best Egyptian movie ever made.” And to prove it, the fifth annual Middle Eastern Film Festival kicked off its events with a free screening Wednesday night in Witherspoon Cinema.

The film is the first of four shown as a part of the series, co-sponsored by the Middle Eastern studies program and the film studies program. Every year, a committee chooses the theme and what films will be shown. This year the theme is gender and politics.

“The selection of films that have English subtitles and that are also available in the Middle East creates a certain restriction,” Akram Khater, professor of history and the director of the Middle Eastern studies program as well as a co-sponsor of the festival, said. “We go with a theme, and we see what’s available. And we try to merge the two together. This year we wanted to show 35 mm films as opposed to previous years when we’ve had only DVDs or VHS.”

According to Terri Ginsberg, a professor of film studies and co-sponsor of the series, 35 mm film produces the best image.

“The 35 mm image is still superior to digital imagery, so you’re going to get to see these films in their full beauty,” she said.

This series is the first for Ginsberg. She said while the films will provide a new perspective for those who are unfamiliar with what true Middle Eastern culture is like, they will also allow students from Middle Eastern nations to see films they would not ordinarily be able to access in the United States.

“We’re interested in supplying a venue in which people can see films about the Middle East that are made and produced in the Middle East, rather than films that are made in Hollywood or European countries that might supply perspectives from the outside,” Ginsberg said. “We want to give people a chance to see films that depict issues of concern to the Middle East from the point of view of people from the Middle East.”

According to Marsha Orgeron, director of the film studies program, only one of the films that will be shown in the series is available on DVD.

“These are films that you otherwise wouldn’t get to see and that don’t get screened in small places,” Orgeron said. “If you were in New York or L.A., you might get a chance to see them. It’s a really important festival, and I always so want our students to come out and see.”

Khater has participated in the series in previous years and said students have expressed degrees of enlightenment and realization regarding issues in the Middle East during discussions following the films.

“People were really very engaged,” Khater said. “A lot of reactions were positive to the films, but generally speaking they were ‘I hadn’t thought about this,’ ‘I hadn’t seen this,’ ‘I hadn’t known about this.’ It seemed like a lot of people got a lot of information from attending these films.”

The lecture Thursday will focus on the disillusioning of Western concepts of the Middle East. Sha’ban, an expert on the topic of American Orientalism, will critique the notions of Middle Eastern culture many Americans hold due to misrepresentations in films and literature.

According to Ginsberg, these misconceptions are nothing new. The films in the series resist Orientalism and are intended to eliminate preconceived ideas about the Middle East with true representations of Middle Eastern culture.

“At a certain point in the early 19th century, there was a shift in orientation from what we call a frontier mentality in the U.S., pushing westward, to an international orientation that, among other things, had a notion of the holy land as its focus,” Ginsberg said. “And, shall we say, eastward expansion became associated with American Orientalists that dates back to the Puritan period and literature and culture in the U.S. during that time.”