Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Sherif Arafa: Movies on the way home Profile by Tarek Atia He dreams of a world on screen, where it's our right to dream

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His father was a director, and they lived in Manial, right in front of a cinema.

"It was an open-air cinema, and when movies came out I'd go see them on the first day and then I'd spy on the rest of the performances from our balcony. So my childhood was very attached to images, especially because in Manial we were surrounded by a large number of cinemas."

Arafa didn't think of being a director until his Thanawiya Amma, "because it's hard for someone to imagine being a director when they're just a child. You might say I want to be an actor, or I want to be a singer, because you can see them, but the director is behind the scenes."

Did he watch his father Saad Arafa making movies?

"Of course, but not that often. I mean, if we went once per film that would be very good. My father didn't like to involve us, to the extent that when my mother found out during the Thanawiya Amma that I wanted to enter the Cinema Institute she completely refused. So I went into the exam trying to get a bad grade, but I actually did well, and I could have gone into engineering but I told them no. Instead I went into the Faculty of Commerce, spent a year there, passed, then, without anyone knowing, I switched over to the Cinema Institute. I didn't tell them until I was half way through my first year there. And by then it was a fait accompli, so they couldn't do much about it and they didn't get that upset."

Sherif Arafa's existence seems to say there is no sense in mourning the extinction of traditional craftsmen who pass their art down to their sons and grandsons. As these hierarchies disappear, new generations of guilds spring up. Arafa is an advertisement for familial specialisation, the way expertise is collected, refined and transmitted.

Arafa works in a high-technology medium, and is following in his father's footsteps. Making movies is his job, his craft, and that of his father before him. This is the way a craft is honed, since it is the very air he has breathed, the language he has spoken, all his life.

"I learned from all the directors I worked with, from my father, from Hassan El-Imam, Atef Salem, Niazi Mustafa, Mohamed Khan... Everyone I worked with I learned from, whether positively or negatively, meaning the bad I don't do, the good I do."

Filmography, 1986-1999: - Al-Aqzam Qadimun (The Midgets Are Coming) - Al-Daraga Al-Talta (Third Class) - Samaa Hoss (Silence, Please) - Al-Li'b Ma' Al-Kubar (Playing with the Big Boys) - Ya Mahallabiya Ya (Dear Pudding) - Al-Irhab Wal-Kabab (Terrorism and Kebab) - Al-Mansi (The Forgotten) - Tuyur Al-Zalam (Birds of Darkness) - Al-Nawm Fi'l-Assal (Sleeping in Honey) - Idhak Al-Sura Titla' Helwa (Smile for the Camera) - Abboud 'Alal-Hudoud (Abboud on the Border)

But who influenced him the most?

"If you can imagine that, I was influenced by all of them, and then I erased them from my head. There's this story about a man who came up to one of the Greek philosophers and said, 'I want to learn poetry'. The philosopher told him to go memorise the poetry that already exists. So he went and learned it and came back and was expecting the philosopher to tell him to recite, but the philosopher told him 'Now forget it all'."

Saad Arafa, Sherif's father, directed 20 films. At under 40, Arafa himself has already directed 11. Most of them show audiences that there is someone who cares about going to the movies, whose goal is to put you in his world for two hours, entertain you and make you think. He is a humanist, but not a romantic. He presents you with a convincing mockery of miserable reality, but then allows you to dream. You come out of the movie theatre pacified, smiling. Isn't that what cinema as a product is all about?

I met him in a room that looked like it could have been the set of one of his movies. The place was spotless, and the walls seemed pink. A window overlooked Doqqi. I placed the tape recorder on a slick wooden table. Arafa sat on a high stool, looking serious.

I thought he had studied abroad. "Everyone makes that mistake, I don't know why... Maybe because I've worked on commercials, and that gave me the opportunity to travel abroad and learn certain techniques that I later used in my films."

It's rare to find a film director who admits to being an artist-capitalist, who doesn't write off advertising work as just a way to make a little money in a crunch, but rather as a serious undertaking, even as something he can learn from.

"Look, I'll tell you something. I am completely opposed to doing anything without full concentration. There's nothing big and nothing small. There's only quality. I mean, there are certain techniques that I've used in ads that I could never have done in cinema. If I waited for two years to make a film and try new techniques every time, I would never improve."

In fact, he has been doing a lot of commercials recently, the ones everyone has seen and remembers, though he doesn't put his name on them. He directed a potato chip ad that has become part of the national consciousness, sealing the link between product and patriotism. There are also the famous ceramics ads with Youssra and Omar Sherif, linking Egypt's lustrous cinematic past with modern-day construction materials. And the more recent air-conditioning ads with the futuristic headquarters and the "American expert" looking like Big Brother on a gigantic TV screen.

"I did an ad recently where the production value was just as high as any James Bond movie. This proves that with time and money we can produce something as good as what's done abroad. But with films, where are you going to find someone willing to spend LE300,000 for one minute of screen time? That's what real production is all about."

A few weeks earlier, Arafa was busy writing some dialogue when we arrived on the set of Abboud 'Alal-Hudoud (Abboud on the Border). It's a big production (LE3 million, according to producer Magdi El-Hawari), and the crew have set up several Bedouin tents and all their gear in the hills behind Abu Rawwash in Giza. This is scorpion and snake territory, meant to be the border area between Egypt and Israel in Sinai where Abboud, the character played by Alaa Waliyyeddin, is stationed.

The film doesn't explicitly accuse Israel of exporting marijuana to Egypt, but it certainly implies it. A mad man named Tommy Bey, played by Ezzat Abu Ouf, is headquartered in a desert set-up much like the one in Arafa's air-conditioning ad, proving he does learn from his commercial work after all. The mysterious Tommy Bey gets orders via a big screen to burn marijuana fields. He spends his time sending out piles of seeds to be planted in different parts of the country. "It doesn't matter if we make a profit off this," he tells his minions. "The most important thing is that we get more and more people to smoke."

"There is no such thing as making your dream film. I know that we are currently in difficult circumstances, which make it very hard to pursue sky-high dreams. We are currently living in the shadows of reasonable expectations, or realistic dreams. You must only dream in realistic terms. Non-realistic dreams are not good for Egypt right now."

Sa'idi Fi'l-Gam'a Al-Amrikiya, the massive Mohamed Heneidi hit that has partly inspired Abboud, had just a few scenes involving "bango". In Abboud, it's the main theme.

Arafa has always been like this. His films have been right there at the forefront of what's permissible on screen -- not necessarily in terms of images, but in the overall mood: finding the limits of what can be said, and stretching them. In Al-Nawm Fi'l-'Asal (Sleeping In Honey), it was sex. And that film carried an Adults Only rating.

In Abboud it's the explicit terminology of the drug culture, and though the film is certainly not the first to go into the matter in such detail (Adrift on the Nile immediately comes to mind, as does Hatta La Yitir Al-Dukhan), those older films were meant to be movies for adults. Abboud clearly targets the 15-year-olds in the malls.

"I'm making it to tell the kids something," Arafa admits. "To tell the shabab I'm not just joking. No. Be careful, you're going to be tricked, and insist on being good no matter what the hardship."

This, he says, is the common theme running through his movies. "All the endings of all my films are linked to each other. I don't like the hero to be defeated. Why do I make this film, to make you negative or positive? The film's intention is not for me to tell you the world is black... why should I do that? The hero's defeat must have a limit, that we don't break down his humanity."

Arafa's movies are entertaining, but for the most part they've had this same sort of underlying seriousness. They've purported to discuss the issues of the day -- the frustration that stems from poverty, bureaucracy, corruption -- with an elevated style, creating moods through colours and sounds, a fantasy world very close to our own, with cartoon characters who seem almost real.

Terrorism and Kebab is the perfect example of this. The film sums up the madness of an over-crowded Cairo in a visual metaphor: the spiral staircase of the Tahrir Square Mugamma'. The film is a comic racehorse thriller, perfectly crafted, with details that stick in the mind, like the packed crowds going round and round, unaware of what floor they're on, or how long they've been there. In the midst of all this, a common man, played by Adel Imam, gets his chance to call the shots for a while. He accidentally takes over the place, a makeshift terrorist demanding that his papers be processed. As the authorities surround the building, he orders lunch, kebab for everyone, then manages to walk away from the scene of the crime undetected, with the help of his newfound crowd of hostage-friends.

It was a rebellion scenario so implausible that it became incisive social criticism, but also a feel-good movie that provides the audience with a virtual stab at the inefficient bureaucracy we've all been victims of.

"A film is never going to change a person," Arafa says. "It can, however, change a condition. It can tell you, 'you're wrong'. But religions are there, and they say what's right and what's wrong, and still we don't listen. It's all about the condition I put you in. I'm not responsible for your actions after that. To send a message or inform: that's television. To leave a mark: that's cinema. A television series will never last as long as a film. If you compare even the best TV series with an Ismail Yassin film, Ismail Yassin wins."

Some would say Arafa's string of films were meant to be valium for a frustrated public. A way to let off steam. Proof that anyone was free to say whatever they wanted, to criticise all the way to the top.

"The idea of terrorism and the government that's in Tuyur Al-Zalam (Birds of Darkness) had to be expressed at the time," Arafa says. "We were not just talking about the 'opportunists' of terrorism, there were government opportunists as well, and they are both equally dangerous. And both are terrorists. And the conflict between them will ruin the country. So be careful."

And while we're on the subject of taboos, few could believe it when, in Al-Mansi (The Forgotten), the character played by Adel Imam, a railway switch operator stationed in the middle of nowhere, had a series of dream sequences that, as Arafa explains it, "were in the context of a guy dreaming he could be this, that and the other thing, so we said, why shouldn't he dream of being president?"

Arafa also spent some time directing Imam in the wildly popular play Al-Za'im (The Leader). Their last cinematic collaboration, the final bow in a partnership that produced a string of '90s blockbusters -- Al-Li'b Ma' Al-Kubar (Playing with the Big Boys), Terrorism and Kebab, The Forgotten, and Birds of Darkness -- was 1996's Sleeping in Honey. It was about impotence, as (what else?) a metaphor for the frustration of the masses. It was a survey of individual, social, and governmental responses to a nationwide crisis. It was also a symbolic masterpiece -- that is, until the last half hour, when it turned into a platform for Adel Imam to ride his high horse of stardom off into the sunset.

The Arafa/Imam films were all comedies with serious undertones that relied on the big star and the brave scriptwriter, Wahid Hamed, for their momentum. Arafa was the master technician who made it all gleam.

That was then. Arafa's considerable talents are now at the service of an industry that is trying to make stars out of the younger generation, and unleash a whole torrent of new faces and films.

With Abboud out in the theatres and doing well, Arafa is busy trying to build up the infrastructure of the cinema industry via the computerised montage studio he's opened up. He's also almost finished writing Normandy II, dubbed "The Egyptian Titanic". "We make fun of everything," Arafa says. "We're talking about our ship, Egypt, and whether it's going to drown or not."

He is sure of the answer to that question.

"In spite of everything," Arafa says, about Egypt and Egyptians, but also about the movie industry and the harsh hours that keep him away from his wife and two daughters, "we don't drown. We're continuing..."

"When I made my second film, I was insulted for a year and a half. If it wasn't for the will inside me, and the fact that I love my work and improving it, I wouldn't have continued."

(photos: Sherif Sonbol)

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