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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 June - 5 July 2000 Issue No. 488 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 June - 5 July 2000 Issue No. 488
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A new kind of thriller
By Khairiya El-BishlawiToday sees the sixth round of the National Festival for Egyptian Cinema drawing to a close. Notwithstanding the prizes, whose announcement in the course of the closing ceremony will no doubt solicit a range of queries as to how and why they are awarded, the festival itself has provoked many thoughts, leaving the reviewer, in many instances, cinematically high and dry. Prizes, while not arbitrary or haphazard, often involve politicking and calculation that are far from objective. In this way they do not necessarily uphold the artistic values to which filmmaking in Egypt presumably aspires. This is especially true of this year's round, since one could hardly have been less enthusiastic about the make-up of the jury. But it is the impressions that the festival has instilled in one's mind that are worthy of discussion and debate.
The foremost impression is that of extraordinary popularity, with scores of viewers crowding outside the Sheraton Cinema in a frenzied attempt to get in. This has a number of implications. For one thing, in the case of festivals of this kind, popularity does not imply profit, whether for cinemas or producers, since the screenings are invariably one-offs, free of charge. For another, and regardless of the non-existence of entry tickets, there was no way of limiting the number of viewers to 323 (the theatre's capacity); often twice as many people managed to get in, giving rise to disorder that more than once required security intervention. In this sense popularity points to disorganisation or at least a fatal lack of organisation. Considering that ticket prices at the Sheraton Cinema, which has a swish and air-conditioned theatre, normally range from LE15 to LE25, and that many viewers were present for all four screenings on any given day, it is not difficult to explain the festival's popularity as a direct consequence of summer heat.
One -- remarkable -- reason the festival was so popular is that Ali Abu Shadi, the former censor and film critic who now heads the festival, managed to bring over the films' stars for seminars to be conducted following each screening. The stars would thus be face to face with their fans before, after and during screenings, and answer viewers' questions -- concerning their personal lives as well as the films under review. These exchanges were more often than not spontaneous occasions for irrelevant, and enormously expansive expressions of love, admiration and support -- in short, nothing to do with film festivals or filmmaking.
Questions that were relevant, on the other hand, revealed the predominant shallowness, intellectual and artistic naiveté and lack of understanding of "the ordinary film lover," indicating that the function of cinema in Egyptian society is still restricted to entertainment -- a fleeting, insignificant, in a word cheap, pastime. In fact the activities of the festival (21-29 June, during which 22 feature films and a huge number of documentaries and short features were screened) present the cultural critic and the sociologist with especially fertile soil for research on the interesting phenomena of film and film festivals in Egypt.
Al-Madina; L'autre; Abboud ala Al-Hodoud
In the case of the two most recent film sensations starring relatively young, late-in-the-day comedy icons like Mohamed Heneidi and Alaa Walieddin (Hammam fi Amsterdam [Hammam in Amsterdam] and Abboud Al-Hodoud [Abboud on the Borders], respectively), popularity gave way to wild cheering -- a situation in which it was impossible to enter the theatre, let alone attend the seminar that featured these two actors. During the seminar -- which, judging by the number of people present, must be considered one of the festival's most engaging activities -- the audience expressed a remarkable degree of satisfaction and joy, and seemed to be in perfect harmony with the two films.
It is hardly worth mentioning that these, and other films featuring the same stars have been attacked by critics, some of whom see them as a form of vulgar entertainment which, left to its own devices, would bring the cinema drastically down. They do make people laugh, but it is not clear why people cannot laugh at more sophisticated or interesting works too, if not exclusively. These two stars have certainly acquired public positions of which they are not entirely worthy, and the sole reason for this is that they fill an otherwise gaping void. Egyptians yearn for comedy and welcome anything that could possibly satisfy that yearning, even when it is vulgar and superficial. Given the long, varied and impressive history of Egyptian comedy, it is certainly saddening that these two actors alone should be its sole purveyors.
Yet within the arena of the National Festival, in fact, comedy went much further than Heneidi and Walieddin. For one thing, the veteran star Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz (who participated in the festival with two recent films, Al-Nims [The Shrewd One] by Ali Abdel-Khaliq and Souq Al-Mot'a [Pleasure Market] by Samir Seif) has more recently joined in the ranks of Egyptian comedy's "worshipped stars," and on far stronger grounds.
If anything, the Egyptian cinema-goer's unconditional love for comic features demonstrates the pressing need for artistically accomplished and intellectually stimulating comedy, one of the few genres that can strike the impossibly difficult balance between high-brow art and popular entertainment. Filling the gap in the production of comic features adequately will help redraw the map of Egyptian cinema so that every comic party involved can rest in its rightful place; and perhaps the rise to stardom would not be so arbitrary or based on such superficial criteria. The point goes doubly for Egyptian cinema as a whole, since the ostensible success of trivial works should in no way indicate that serious ones would not be equally successful, even despite the commercial producers' incessant claim that "this," in the final analysis, "is what the audience wants." One unfortunate consequence of that claim is the erroneous assumption that the audience will want nothing else, which in effect amounts to the exclusion of innumerable and potentially successful projects that would require a little more risk.
Four out of 22 participating films were directorial debuts, a relatively large proportion that one would have applauded had the total number of full-length features not been so disappointingly small, reflecting a national industry that has been far from buoyant in recent years, and has far outlived all talk of the "crisis of the cinema": Al-Sharaf (Honour) by Mohamed Shaaban, Hassan wa Aziza (Hassan and Aziza) by Karim Gamaleddin, Al-Abwab Al-Moghlaqa (Shut Doors) by Atef Hatata and Fatah min Israel (A Girl from Israel) by Ihab Radi. However different to each other -- in both content and working methods -- each of these four films reflects one side of the industry's problems, emphasising the fact that young filmmakers in the main are not being given a chance.
Shaaban, who has unwittingly become an outstanding documentary filmmaker, has not had a chance to make the feature he wanted to make until now, when he is already over 50 years of age; in stark contrast Hatata, who studied engineering and whose mathematical and unfeeling approach reflects his studies, found his way into the industry through Youssef Chahine, after working with Chahine on his third autobiographical feature Alexandrie Encore et Toujours indicating that it is easier for new filmmakers to succeed through affiliating themselves with an authoritative "school" like Chahine's. And Ihab Radi, had he not belonged to a cinematic family, might have had to wait more than nine years (he graduated from the Film Institute in 1990) before making his first full-length feature.
While some films are produced by the Radio and Television Union, others, like Youssri Nassralla's Al-Madina (The City), Chahine's L'Autre and Hatata's Al-Abwab Al-Moghlaqa (Shut Doors) are produced in collaboration with France. In the light of this fact, it is only too telling that both Gamaleddin (36 years old) and Shaaban have chosen to tackle the same -- nationalist -- issue, though in significantly different ways to each other. It seems that Egypt's position on the world's political map, its recent history (of wars with Israel), as well as the poverty and dispossession of the Egyptian citizen are the only topics production companies are willing to wager; and regardless of the three films presently under review, the approach, alas, tends to be simplistic and generalising.
The festival's greatest advantage is the airing with which it provided many film institute graduates, whether documentary, short fiction or animation filmmakers (this subsidiary programme ran from 21 to 25 June). To mention but two examples: Atef Shukri's documentary Hadaiq Al-Qatl (The Killing Gardens) deals with the issue of landmines left in Alamen since World War II; while El-Sayed Hilal's Al-Mawqaf (The Stop), an articulate and gripping film, registers virtually the whole of Egyptian society through a close encounter with the Ahmed Helmi bus stop, where all the buses arriving from and departing to different parts of the Delta stop on their way. Animation films, in particular, are equally refreshing, with innovative and serious works that effectively employ this as yet abandoned medium like Sabri Abdel-Aziz's Limadha (Why?) and Ghada Mohamed Wafiq's Ismeti (My Lot). Of the numerous short fictions that were shown, many of which were excellent, Matar (Rain) by Ahmed Ramsis stood out for its purity of thought and its laden simplicity, depicting a chance meeting between three interesting strangers brought together by the rain.
The better part of the festival naturally drew to itself a better audience. Those who came to see short fictions and documentaries were far more interested in the actual films than the air-conditioning or the possible encounter with a star. In this sense the festival did accomplish its essential mission of bringing together unknown filmmakers and true film lovers who perhaps cannot normally afford the Sheraton Cinema's tickets. The interaction was palpable and stimulating, yet it remains true that audiences, filmmakers and Egypt's one alternative producer (the National Film Institute) remain sadly in the shadows. And with the figure of LE200,000,000 as the minimum amount of money required to establish a production company in Egypt, there is virtually only one new company, Sho'a', which contributed five of the festival's features, most of which were of high quality. Before many other companies follow in Sho'a's footsteps, however, it is not at all clear how any of these elements (a serious and innovative filmmaker, a producer willing to take risks, an enthusiastic critic and an enlightened viewer with a true interest in filmmaking) will feed into the commercial industry, achieving the mutually beneficial goal of raising the standards and scope of commercial films while at the same time carving out a sizable niche for the artists, the experts, the intellectuals.
