Issue No. 600
Culture
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22 - 28 August 2002 Issue No. 600 Culture |
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In progress: Beyond the cause
Youssri Nasrallah is an independent filmmaker. He has directed three feature films: Sariqat Sayfiyya (Summer Thefts), Mercedes, and Al-Madina (The City) as well as a documentary film: Subyan wa Banat (On Boys, Girls and the Veil). He has worked closely with director Youssef Chahine on a number of films including Haddouta Masriya (Egyptian Story), Adieu Bonaparte and Alexandrie Encore et Toujours as well as the docu-drama Al-Qahira Munawwara bi-Ahliha (Cairo Illuminated by Its People). In the 1970s, while studying at Cairo University, Nasrallah was active in the student movement. In 1978 he moved to Lebanon, at the height of the Civil War, and stayed for four years, writing for the newspaper Al-Safir.
We have to do the interview over the phone because I'm flying abroad in a couple of days. I'm currently working on a film based on Ilyas Khouri's novel Bab Al-Shams. This will be my fourth feature film. How did the idea come about? Well, I've become bored of Egypt, frankly, and of the same old subjects and stories. In the end, of course, one is trying to talk about oneself. But there is a main cause that preoccupies us and bothers us, the Palestinian cause. Yet we have never truly dealt with it. We always talk about "that Palestinian cause" but we adore to forget there are Palestinians. It's not accurate that there haven't been Egyptian films on Palestine. There's Tawfik Saleh's Al-Makhdou'un (The Deceived) -- a wonderful film -- based on Ghassan Kanafani's novel. He did it in Syria, but he's still one of our finest directors.
What encouraged me to embark on this project is that I found a novel that talks about Palestinians more than the cause; about the people, the fellahin of Al-Jalil between the years 1948 and 1994 living in refugee camps in Lebanon. It's fundamentally a love story between a Palestinian living in Lebanon and his wife who remains in Al-Jalil. He slips in to meet her in the cave called Bab Al-Shams and they have many children. The main idea or theme in the film is love; how you discover love when you lose it, discover the nation when you lose it.
The cast is made up of Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians. There are no Egyptians in the film. For me it's a matter of credibility. I like Egyptian actors and I've loved working with them and everything but the idea of believing them is what concerns me here; I always take those whom I believe, the actors I work with are very frequently people whom I take from non-acting backgrounds, non-professionals whom I direct very professionally and they give performances which I find very credible. For me there will always be something phony about an Egyptian playing a Palestinian. This cast is a mixture of everything, there's no dogma behind it, so some of the actors are professionals and some are not, some have acted before, others not, some come from television. The main challenge for me is not to make you believe them but for me to believe them, so that when they stand before me to act I don't sit there cringing because I don't believe them.
We start shooting on 14 September in Syria where we'll recreate pre- 1948 Palestine. In Lebanon we'll shoot the refugee camps the characters went to live in. The first shoot ends in December, and then we pick it up again end of April until end of May; we need to wait for the seasons. So this time next year I might have something to show you.
Yes, there's the added challenge of working on the historical settings. Some of it is fun, some of it is very strange for me and some of it I have no clue as to how I'm going to do it. Sure I have battle scenes and stuff like this but for me the most bizarre aspect of the film -- and the most difficult -- is how not to slip into American cinema's depiction of Nazis, for example, and substitute Nazis by Israelis which I find highly uninteresting, or Russian cinema's depiction of what a hero should be like, positive heroes and all that stuff. I find this very challenging; to find directorial solutions where what you see is something that is not a stereotype but more like something you discover, humanly. I don't know. I'm still thinking about how to deal with these themes and I'm getting closer to finding solutions that are more fun to do than the déjà vu stuff which is so easy to slip into.
I really don't give a damn whether the film will be commercially popular. Honestly, I find the story very moving, all the people who have read the script cried while reading it, there's no reason why it should not be popular. But maybe some will say "oh, the film is in the Palestinian accent, what a bore" -- I don't care, for me the main challenge is to make a good movie.
The funding for the film did come from abroad; from Morocco, France and Syria. There is no Egyptian funding. We've been to Egyptian television with the project, they read it, they loved it, but when it came to committing to details and figures they were very evasive. All my films are screened everywhere in the Arab world except Egypt.
Foreign funding is easier than finding funds here, despite the international developments. People here love the Palestinian cause but can't stand something called Palestinians. I don't know really what they want to watch -- the stereotype of the suicide- bomber, perhaps, or the rhetorician. But to talk about Palestinians as human beings, how they live in refugee camps, how they love each other, how they hate each other, people go "oh no, there's something called Palestinians? No we don't want this. We want to say there's a Palestinian cause and Egypt supports it." But who are those Palestinians? One amazing thing you often hear from people is "those dirty bastards, they sold their land" that's what Sadat propaganda has succeeded in entrenching in people's minds. The film collides with this idea head on. To sell your land you have to be a landowner; and there's no such thing as a whole people of landowners. To wipe out all the massacres, the coercion, the betrayal, to let a country go just like that in order to relieve your own conscience and say "well, the Palestinians sold their land" might be convenient, but this film does not deal with this. This film does not deal with peace at all. The Oslo phase is there but we're not talking about nice Palestinians and nice Israelis who are going to live happily ever after. We're talking about a very huge injustice that has happened in the history of the 20th century and that has not yet been resolved. "Injustice" is a light word, actually, but massacres, mass expulsion, transfers, history is there. That's what we're trying to narrate here in a very fictional form, but one entirely based on reality, on accounts, on people who are telling their stories of what has happened.
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