12 - 18 July 2001
Issue No.542
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542 |
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The Arab dream
Last Saturday saw the closing ceremony of the Seventh Cairo Festival for Radio and Television (2-7 July), reports Hanan Sabra. The event was held at the Media Production City in 6 October City, presided over by the Minister of Information Safwat El-Sherif. In his speech El-Sherif reiterated points made during the opening ceremony of the festival, which featured singing performances by Ali El-Haggar, Hoda Ammar and Agfan El-Amin. Arabs working in the media must cooperate, El-Sherif asserted, to fulfil the Arab dream of a new golden age.
Sanaa Gamil
photo: Doaa Abu-Se'da
In the course of the festival, some 894 productions competed for a great number of prizes amounting to LE267,000 in all. A special award for the best television or radio documentary on Jerusalem, worth LE42,000, was introduced this year: it went to the Egyptian film Rasa'il Falastine (Messages of Palestine). The festival's honourary director was the widely celebrated radio presenter Amal Fahmi, whose daily morning programme Ala Al- Nasya (At the Street Corner) has been a consistent part of millions of people's lives.
The Egyptian serial Nisr Al-Sharq (Eagle of the East) and the Syrian drama Al- Khayzaran shared the best historical drama award, while the best social drama award went to two Egyptian soap opera hits, Awan Al-Ward (Time of the Roses) and Opera Aida; many soap operas screened during Ramadan won awards. The best comedy serial award went to the Egyptian drama Horouf Al-Nasb (The Alphabet of Swindling) and the Kuwaiti serial Souq Al- Maqasis (Cloth Market).Winners also included actors Yehia El-Fakharani, Mahmoud Yassin, Youssef Shaaban, Hesham Abdel-Hamid and Hadi El-Gayyar, Youssra and Hanan Turk; directors Hani Ismail, Mohamed Fadel, Samir Seif; and script writer Wahid Hamed.
Honoured were the recently deceased icon Soad Hosni, the late poet Abdel- Salam Amin and the late anchor Tumader Tawfiq. Several practising actors, including Gamil Rateb, Abdel-Rahman Abu Zahra, Nadia Lutfi, Samira Ahmed, Sanaa Gamil and the team of Mohamed Khan's recent film Ayyam Al-Sadat (Days of Sadat), were honoured.
Doors to forgiveness
Some 2,500 copies of filmmaker and script-writer Raafat El-Mihi's first novel, Hurghada: Sihr Al-Ishq (Hurghada: Love's Magic), published recently by the Paris-based Darwish Press, were confiscated on entry into Egypt after the censors decided to ban the novel, 21 days after it was seized by customs. The reason for the banning remains obscure, but commentators point out that it relates to both the artistic "shock tactics" that have given El-Mihi's films a reputation for being strange and the novel's treatment of a love story between a Muslim man and Christian woman.In the context of the latter reason, many conjecture that the banning is a reaction to the sectarian strife generated some three weeks ago by the tabloid newspaper Al- Nabaa, which inopportunely exploded the scandal of a Coptic monk expelled from the church for personal misconduct more than five years ago. Yet the decision to ban the novel was made prior to Al-Nabaa's journalistic blunder. Some reports on the few, smuggled copies of the novel that have been available in Egypt point out that there is nothing in it that furnishes justification for banning.
El-Mihi uses the English, rather than the Arabic word (Ghardaqa) for the title of his novel -- a choice that no doubt contributed to his detractors' dismissive attitude. Although the filmmaker has since pointed out that Hurghada is originally an Arabic word (Hurjada), in the context of the kind of conspiracy theory that informs much current critical discourse, the foreign title and the fact that novel was published abroad would suggest that it has controversial features. As El-Mihi insists, however, the novel is set ostensibly in Hurghada simply because he wrote it there, and the town "as a set of geographical details is in no way present in the novel," which is set, rather, "in a place made up of various parts; it had to be a far place because I wanted my characters to be isolated."
Delineating a variety of instances, El- Mihi explained how the presence of Copts in his works reflects their inescapable presence in society: "My society is a Muslim man and a Christian woman, a Muslim woman and Christian man, can you deny that? "God could never be as cruel as all that," he declared. "He created some 400 doors to forgiveness and they closed them all, whether Muslims or Christians or Jews... Anyway," El-Mihi summed up, "the 'sensitivity' of Muslim-Christian relations is merely a middle-class hang-up. In the rest of society there is no such thing."
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