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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region Focus International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Arab elsewhere
By David TresilianA strong Egyptian presence marks the 5th Biennale of Arab Cinemas in Paris, the latest edition of an event organised every second year for the last decade by the Arab World Institute on the Quai de la Seine in Paris. Opening last Friday and running at two locations until 9 July, the event features a special section devoted to the "New Egyptian Comics," which inevitably means Mohamed Heneidi in An Upper-Egyptian at the American University in Cairo (1998) and Hammam in Amsterdam (1999), as well as a retrospective devoted to Umm Kulthoum, and, intriguingly, a chance to review the career of the actress and dancer Tahia Carioca thanks to a special screening of her films. Beyond this Egyptian presence, however, there is also the regular competition of documentary, full-length and shorter films, a retrospective of Algerian cinema and a focus on the media industry of the Arab Gulf, chiefly on its video and documentary production.
For those hoping to find common concerns linking up production over the past two years in Arab cinemas -- the plural noun nevertheless announcing in advance the organisers' plural emphasis -- the biennale's publicity material offers a few pointers. Despite "the very diverse centres of interest of the young filmmakers" represented at the event, they all have a common desire to put "the individual, in his or her singularity" at the centre of their work. This emphasis, the writer continues, one finds in varying degrees in all the films in competition.
For example, "Abdellatif Abdel Hamid [in Breath of the Spirit, 1998] tells the story of a young couple in contemporary Syria; the two Moroccan films, both of whose directors are from Tangiers, deal with la question feminine [Feminine Wiles, 1999; Tresses, 2000]; the Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli returns with a film mixing the themes of women and of emigration [The Season of Men, 2000], and, in the Algerian Nadir Mokneche's film Madame Osman's Harem (1999) men too are shown to be emigrating."
To this notion of a focus on the individual must be added a shared emphasis in the films in competition on emigration and on a concomitant retreat from events at home. Viewed in this way the films "confirm the emergence of a cinema of the diaspora," something also illustrated in the documentary films on show. Individual lives, internal or external emigration and a turning inwards or away from heavyweight public themes seem to be the terms in which the Arab cinemas of the last years of the 20th century are to be viewed.
One of the biennale's great advantages over the ordinarily scattered reception-conditions that are part-and-parcel of regular cinema-going is that it allows films to be experienced in close proximity to each other, rather as one might re-hang paintings at an exhibition in order to invite fresh perspectives on the works and new forms of dialogue between them.
Thus, on the first day of the biennale, essays in 1960s rhetoric, such as Ahmed Rachedi's 1965 piece The Dawn of the Damned (a part of the Algerian retrospective), which mixed doses of Fanon and of Eisenstein with a dramatic, Wagnerian film-score, were juxtaposed with the Tunisian director Fitouri Belhiba's picture Mirror Effect (1999), a whimsical documentary piece about a Belgian ice-cream vendor living somewhere in contemporary Tunisia, which had, nevertheless, some acute observations at its core, followed by a welcome chance to see again the young Egyptian-born director Safaa Fathy's 1999 bio-pic D'ailleurs, Derrida [Derrida, Elsewhere], which showed the French philosopher Jacques Derrida revisiting his native Algeria, among other places, while gnomically rehearsing a deconstructionist take on the question of personal and national identity.
Derrida spoke interestingly about collage, as he marched or drove his car about in Algerian, French and North American environments, inviting the spectator to follow him through a life consisting of an arrangement of geographically and temporally dispersed bits. These one cuts up and arranges into a narrative or picture of a life; in your case, he told the filmmaker who lurked, most of the time, behind the camera, pasting them together to give the effect of a seamless film. But what if one put things together differently -- what sort of picture of identity would that yield? That question retroactively rather haunted Rachedi's muscular sixties piece, which used the device of a group of young researchers in a library stitching together a narrative of Algerian national identity rather as a filmmaker puts together sequences in a film. But it was implicit too in Belhiba's gentle, less obviously political depiction of the Belgo-Tunisian Lik-Lik ice-cream franchise, which explored questions of self and other through the possibly somewhat unlikely medium of the problems of running a small catering business in a foreign milieu.
In the competition's documentary section, as much as in that devoted to fiction, one found a willingness to unstitch the received picture, to look again at the details of conventional, or not so conventional, lives and to foreground issues surrounding emigration and diaspora. Taken together with the biennale's historical and feature-film sections, one thus got a generous, cosmopolitan and variegated picture of the present state of Arab cinemas, being one that possessed a strong in-built commitment both to pluralism of method and of subject.
Elsewhere in the documentary section, the young French director Yamina Benguigi's second full-length documentary The Perfumed Garden (2000) deserves mention. Benguigi's previous film Immigrants' Memories [Mémoires d'immigrés] met with wide acclaim when it was released in 1998, presenting in three sections -- Fathers, Mothers and Young People -- the experience of North-African immigrants in France across the first and second generations. Her new film continued the method of this one, being the direct presentation without authorial comment of the testimony of her subjects. Dealing with the difficult subject of "desire, sexuality and seduction," the film tactfully met some obvious objections, while showing an extraordinarily well-judged editorial control. One suspects that the competition jury, presided over by the Egyptian documentary filmmaker Attiyat El-Abnoudi, whose own new film Cairo 1000, Cairo 2000 is on show at the biennale but not in competition, will have a particularly difficult task in deciding on this section's winners.
For those able to cram in further films, the Tahia Carioca retrospective includes Hussein Kamal's Ah Ya Balad! (1986) and Salah Abu Seif's The Bully [Al-Futuwwa, 1957] and The Vamp [Shabab Imra'a, 1956], all of which are vehicles for the Egyptian actress and dancer who died last September. In addition to the two Mohamed Heneidi vehicles, the "New Egyptian Comics" section of the Biennale offers French and international audiences a chance to catch up on this latest new wave with Abboud on the Frontier [Abboud 'Ala Al-huduud, 1999) and Come and See! [Itfarag Ya Salaam, 2000], while the event's review of film and video production in the Gulf states offers a rare opportunity to see how the media have developed there over the last decade or so. Particularly noteworthy here is Khadija Al-Salami's Land of Saba [Ard Al-Saba, 1997], a synopsis of Yemeni archaeological heritage placing this in relation to the modern history of this, by Western audiences, often poorly understood country. The Biennale's Umm Kulthoum retrospective offers Parisian audiences the chance to see In'am Mohamed Ali's three-hour documentary on the life of the great Egyptian singer and actress (Egypt, 1999). This will be a special event according to the event's programme, since Paris, alone of all Western capitals, once hosted a concert by la Dame de la chanson arabe.
The Biennale at a glance
Films in competition:
High School [Oula Thanawi] Egypt, 1999, Mohamed Abu Seif;
The Sheikh's Blessing [Barakat Al-Sheikh] Sudan, 1998, Gadallah Gubara;
Journalists [Al-Sahafiyoun] Algeria-Netherlands, 2000, Karim Traidia;
Madame Osman's Harem [Harim Madam Othman] Algeria-France, 1999, Nadir Mokneche;
Fallen Angels' Paradise [Gannet Al-Shayatin] Egypt, 1999, Osama Fawzi;
Shut Doors [Al-Abwab Al-Mughlaqa] Egypt-France, 1998, Atef Hatata;
Feminine Wiles [Keid Al-Nisaa] Morocco/Switzerland/Tunisia/France, 1999, Farida Binel-Yazid;
The Season of Men [Mousim Al-Regal] Tunisia-France, 2000, Mufida Tlatli;
The Breath of the Spirit [Naseem Al-Ruh] Syria, 1998, Abdel-Latif Abdel-Hamid;
Foreign Land [Turab Al-Gurabaa] Syria, 1998, Samir Zikra;
Land of Fear [Ard Al-Khawf] Egypt, 1999, Dawoud Abdel-Sayed;
Tresses [Safa'ar] Morocco, 2000, Jillali Ferhati
Documentary Films:
Algeria, the Children Speak [Al-Gaza'ir, Atfal Tashhad] Algeria/Belgium/France, 1999, Kamal Dehane;
Cafishanta [Kafishanta] Tunisia, 2000, Hisham Bin Ammar;
The English Sheikh and the Yemeni Gentleman [Al-Sheikh Inglizi Wal-gentlman Al-Yamani] Yemen-Great Britain, 2000, Bader Bin Hirsi;
Derrida, Elsewhere [D'ailleurs, Derrida] Egypt-France, 1999, Safaa Fathi;
Mirror Effect [Al-Miraat Al-Akisa] Tunisia-France, 1999, Fitouri Bil-Hiba;
Fadwa, a Palestinian Poet [Fadwa, Hikayat Shai'ra Min Falastin] Palestine, 1999, Liana Badr;
The Perfumed Garden [Le Jardin Perfumé] Algeria-France, 2000, Yamina Bin Guigui;
Dying Twice [Mowta Thaniya] Morocco-France, 2000, Ivan Boccara;
Nagui Al-Ali, A Visionary Artist [Nagui Al-Ali, Fanan Dhu Ru'ya] Iraq-Great Britain, 1999, Qasim Abid;
Paul the Carpenter [Paulus Al-Naggar] Palestine-France, 1999, Ibrahim Khill;
When Men Cry [Indama Yabki Al-Rigal] Morocco-Belgium, 1999, Yasmine Qassari;
The Voice of Sabri Mudallal [Halab, Mo'amat Al-Masra] Syria/France/UAE, 1998, Mohamed Malas;
Seven Nights and a Morning [Saba'a Layali Wa Sabahiya] Egypt, 1998, Arab Lutfi;
Taqasim of Baghdad [Taqasim Min Baghdad] Lebanon, 1999, Sayed Kaado;
A Woman Taxi-Driver at Sidi Bil-Abbas [Israr Imra'a] Algeria-Belgium, 2000, Bil-Qassim Hadjadj.
The Biennale also features a shorter documentaries and a short-films competition, as well as sections devoted to Gulf television, to Tahia Carioca and Umm Kalthoum, and to the New Egyptian Comedies.
