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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 November 1999 Issue No. 456 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 November 1999 Issue No. 456
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Aleppo, site of many a scene in Samir Zekra's Torab Al-Ghoraba' (The Dust of Strangers) winner of the Special Jury Award at the Damascus Film Festival
Going for gold
By Fawzi Soliman
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The Damascus Festival in Syria alternates with the Carthage Festival in Tunisia and while the former showcases Arab, Asian and Latin American cinema, the latter concentrates on African cinema. Between them, they have the Third World covered.
Recently, though, the Carthage Festival has expanded its horizons to include more European films, while the 11th round of the Damascus festival (30 Oct-6 Nov) gave in to the millennium bug and presented a special programme -- Selections of World Cinema Within from a Century -- which included several Arab films alongside such classics as Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Federico Fellini's Notte di Cabiria (1957).
Another special programme, A New Wave in Chinese Cinema, proved less popular than Bernardo Bertolucci's Chinese themed The Last Emperor and Emir Kustorica's Zaman Al-Fagr, perhaps because it managed to exclude any films by younger directors such as Chen Kaige or Zhang Yimou, concentrating instead on such uncontroversial films as Huan Shuqin's, and was rather full of conventional films including My Daddy. Shuqin was, incidentally, head of the international jury.
Nine Arab films were in official competition, along with four Latin American and four Asian films. The quantitative and qualitative success of Arab cinema was outstanding: the Egyptian entry, Gannet Al-Shayatin (Devils' Paradise) won the Golden Award while the Syrian entry Nassim Al-Roh (Soul Breeze) garnered the Silver. Torab Al-Ghoraba' (The Dust of Strangers), another Syrian film, received the Special Jury Award. Asian cinema, by contrast, gained a single honour, the cinematography prize, which went to The Red River Valley, while the most successful Latin American film was the Colombian production, The Debt, which received the Bronze Award. The prize for best actress went to the Chilean film Revenge.
The results, though, do not provide a particularly accurate picture of the health or otherwise of the various national cinemas, reflecting instead, a curious curatorial policy that appeared to ignore the best of new filmmaking.
There were, for example, no Iranian films, despite the enormous success of recent Iranian cinema on the international film festival circuit and its inclusion in previous rounds of the Damascus Festival. In 1997 Iranian cinema was showcased in a special eight-film panorama, and subsequently the reels were lent to Carthage, and to the Cairo film festival, where they were shown to great acclaim. Why, one wondered, the absence this year?
The majority of Arab films in competition were old releases, meaning that one of the more interesting aspects of the festival was to compare just which film won what, and dissect how different the jury's estimation of various films was to other festivals. Nassim Al-Roh by Abdel-Latif Abdel-Hamid, for example, was screened at the Cairo International Festival in 1998 and went practically unnoticed, yet in Damascus it won the Silver Award, with many suggesting it should have been gold. Certainly the film underlined Abdel-Hamid's claims to being a true auteur, treading the difficult path between commercial and art-house cinema almost as deftly as it combined fantasy and realism.
The Golden Award-winner, Gannet Al-Shayatin, is director Ossama Fawzi's second film, the follow-up to his debut Afarit Al-Asfalt (Asphalt Demons). It won both the International Jury Prize and the Grand Prize at the last Alexandria Mediterranean Film Festival. A loose adaptation by Mostafa Zikri of a novel by Jorge Amado, the film foregrounds death alongside its biting satire of the habits of the bourgeoisie that the protaganist abandons in favour of an underground existence. Revolving around death, it involves substantial sarcasm and satire directed against the bourgeoisie to which the protagonist belonged and decided to abandon for the underground.
But will the festival success attract an audience or will Gannet Al-Shayatin meet the same fate as Radwan El-Kashef's Araq Al-Balah (Date Wine) which closed in public cinemas after only a week.
Samir Zekra's Special Jury Prize-winning film Torab Al-Ghoraba' deals with the life of the revolutionary reformer Abdel-Rahman Al-Kawakbi (1855-1902). Set in Aleppo, the director's birthplace, it makes the most of the charming old city as backdrop, and the streets and alleyways provide a welcome relief to the film's overly pedantic tone. Not particularly convincing as a bio-pic, Zekra chooses not to tackle Al-Kawakbi's well-documented sojourn in Egypt, where he travelled to escape Ottoman persecution.
The jury's decision to withhold the best actor prize came as something of a surprise, since the Syrian actor Ghassan Kusa, who was outstanding in Nassim Al-Roh, as well as playing Al-Kawakbi in Torab Al-Ghoraba', had been a firm favourite. Yet the audience at the Damascus Festival's closing ceremony was too polite to express resentment, even though there had been a great deal of disagreement within the multi-national jury.
Latin American cinema is one of passion, social contradictions, magic, as well as self-irony, as evidenced in The Debt by Manuel José Alvarez and Nicolas B Vidal, which contains a great deal of irony, fantasy and popular and religious rituals. Watching the Chilean film Revenge by Andres Wood, on the other hand, feels exactly like watching an old Egyptian melodrama. Tamara Acosta's performance in the film, which is based on the sexual intrigues of a feudal lord, won her the Best Actress Award.
