23 - 29 August 2001
Issue No.548
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 23 - 29 August 2001 Issue No.548 |
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Rhetorical questions
Ten years of national cinema: Mustafa Darwish explores a many-sided failure
What is strange about the National Festival for Egyptian Cinema (which ends today) is that, while it has existed under one or another name for more than 10 years, it remains an erratic, shaky affair. What with the importance attached to it as an aid to revitalising the ailing film industry -- the National Festival was posited, let it be remembered, as a partial answer to the crisis -- one would expect the event to have stabilised by now, acquiring a firm foundation of principles. Yet curatorial policy has fluctuated wildly in the decade-long interim, and every year the same questions about the activities and functions of the festival are asked again. Is the event worthy of the Ministry of Culture's continued support? And if so, when and where will it be held this year? Will the official competition include documentaries, short features and animation films as well as full-length features? Or will the festival return to the policy of the first three years of its life, allowing only full-length features in the official competition? How will official competition candidates be selected? Will films be allowed to enter the official competition irrespective of artistic merit? Or will the opportunity be offered only to films deemed worthy by a previewing committee sanctioned by the festival director? The questions posed annually by the festival suggest that its formation has yet to be completed after 10 years.
One example of how the festival falls short of being a fully-formed event is that the present round started not in the second half of April (as is set down in the festival's rules), but in the first half of August. Both the opening ceremony and every subsequent screening of the festival's 15 full-length features, moreover, were held in one of three venues, -- the Main Hall of the Opera House, the Gumhuriya Theatre and the Garden City Cultural Palace -- none of which is a film theatre or was ever intended to be one. Thus, too, was the fate of a total of 64 documentaries, animation and short films, most of which were Cinema Institute graduation projects: they were invariably screened in the Hanager Theatre, Opera House Grounds. What is even more distressing is that the director of the festival failed to apply the rules in yet another, crucial respect: he did not draw up a previewing committee for selecting the films to be screened. This may be due to time constraints, or perhaps it simply reflects the scarcity of full-length features currently being produced.
Certainly the inclusion of films like Shagei' Al-Sima (Brave Man of the Movies) and Ferqat Banat wa Bass (The Girls Only Team) -- by Ali Ragab and Sherif Shaaban, respectively -- can in no way contribute to revitalising a sector that suffers from complacency and mediocrity, and is fast losing its audience. Each is a shot-by-shot replica of an American film: John Badham's The Hard Way (1991) and Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, respectively. Worth mentioning in the context of films that serve to impede the festival's performance, too, are Ragab's Al-Agenda Al-Hamra (The Red Diary), Mohamed Salah Abu-Seif's Batal min Al-Ganoub (Hero from the South), Hassan El- Seifi's Shurou' fi Qatl (Intent to Kill) and Ali Abdel-Khaleq's Yameen Talaq (Divorce Oath). Of all these, only the last merits any commentary, thanks not to the film itself but to the director's success in the past: Abdel-Khaleq, who made the celebrated Ughnia ala El-Mamar (Passageway Song), the first ever film on the 1967 defeat, generated defeaning applause once more with his 1983 hit Al-Aar (Dishonour); his name is attached to a host of other films, some of which were successful. Yet in his present collaboration with the Media Production City -- a patched-up medley of bad story-telling and vulgar moralising -- Abdel-Khaleq begins with the angry uttering of the oath, literally, and ends with the face of the child (victim) reciting an oft- quoted Quranic verse, to the effect that, of all the activities permitted by God, divorce is the one He dislikes the most. In between, the viewer is treated to a string of implausibly dramatic events and boorish depictions of depravity, receiving a contrived, irrelevant and absurd lesson in social morals, on the ills of divorce.
The National Festival awards were announced Sunday night at the Main Hall of the Opera House. The five winners are: Said Hamed's Short wa Fanilla wa Cap (Shorts, T-shirt and a Cap), which gleaned five awards (best film, best director, best director of photography--Sameh Selim, best actor--Ahmed El-Saqqa and best editing--Maha Rushdi); Khaled Youssef's Al-Asifa (The Storm), which received the same number of awards (best directorial debut, the second production award, best actress-Youssra, best supporting actress--Hanan Turk and best music--Kamal El-Tawil); the late Sameh El-Bagouri's Kursi fil Kulub (Party Pandemonium), which came second with three awards (a special award to the name of El-Bagouri, the third production award and best set-designer--Mukhtar Abdel-Gawwad); actor Nour El-Sherif's directorial debut Al-Ashiqan (The Lovers), which received the best screenplay award (Kawthar Heikal); and Mohamed Amin's Film Thaqafi (A Cultural Film) received the best supporting actor award (Fathi Abdel-Wahab).
photo: Abdel-Hamid Eid
It was evident from the start that only four films would compete for the festival's awards -- Khaled Youssef's Al-'Asifa (The Storm), Nour El-Sherif's Al-Ashiqan (The Lovers), Ahmed Atef's Omar 2000 and Mohamed Amin's Film Thaqafi (A Cultural Film) -- all of which are their respective director's debut. A brief outline of each will reveal how deeply the current cinematic malaise has taken root in the festival: evidently even the best national cinema has to offer is barely good in most cases. With the exception of the last (a humorous and convincing dramatic representation of the social and sexual frustrations of the young), the aforementioned features are each beset by more than one serious flaw. Omar 2000 is a cryptic affair that requires an explanatory catalogue in order to be understood. Al-Ashiqan, an unrealistic love story depicted unrealistically, is like the work of a diligent student of writing who has yet to learn how to string together letters into words. Al-Asifa is a naively manipulative take on the Gulf War, boring and artificial: when her two sons (played by Mohamed Nagati and Hani Salama), who join the Iraqi and Egyptian army, respectively, end up fighting against each other, an Egyptian mother (Yusra) wails endlessly, thus symbolising the tragedy of inter-Arab strife. Whether a Hollywood rip-off or a veteran actor's directorial debut, such films reflect the Ministry's policy of favouring quantity over quality; what is disturbing about the last lot of films is that they are officially celebrated for no reason other than the need to give the awards to some film, any film, rather than waiting until worthy candidates emerge.
Such a disappointing programme -- partly due to the crisis of cinema at large -- is but one manifestation of the festival's failure, a result of both of the uncritical encouragement that is given to any state- supported cultural activity with "good" political intentions, and the hurried, last-minute administrative methods the festival has adopted in recent years. These damaging conditions of operation explain why the festival opened with Fatah min Filistine (A Girl from Palestine), a thoroughly mangled affair produced in a rush to capitalise on the 1948 War commercially, one that, through bad taste and naiveté, has probably done the Palestinian question more harm than good. The director of the festival likewise undertook the restoration of the negative in a hurry, with disastrous results; the well-known song "Ya Migahid fi Sabil Illah" (You Who Struggles for God), for example, no longer exists intact on the negative. The opening was thus doubly disappointing.
In truth, except for Film Thaqafi, none of this year's offerings deserves an award. And if it were not for the unwritten rule against withholding awards -- a rule broken only once, 10 years ago, by the festival's first jury, which was headed by the writer Anis Mansour -- none would have received any. Subsequent National Festival juries, by contrast, have abided by this rule consistently for an entire decade, bowing to pressures from the dictates of the Ministry of Culture which insists that, regardless of the quality of the films in question, give awards it must.
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