Issue No. 603
Culture
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12 - 18 September 2002 Issue No. 603 Culture |
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In progress: Splits and margins
Sherif El-Azma, independent filmmaker, studied film at the Surrey Institute. He has produced several videos and short films, among them Order in Satellite City (1997), Donia/Amar (2000), Interview with a Housewife (2001) and A Prayer to the Sound of Dogs (2001)
Right now I'm working on a new video project, and it's a bit different from what I've done before. It involves actors, it involves a narrative and a story. The way I'm working is completely independent. I'm going to be my own camera man, though there will be a small crew. I do have a script but I'm not working in a traditional way where you have a script and go out and shoot it. I'm working on building characters through workshops.
The main guidelines of the work: I have six characters, young women living in Cairo from different backgrounds, and I suppose you could say the theme will be young women, their aspirations, dreams, failures, successes.
When I was thinking about the project I felt that there were very few films made about women anyway, and in cinema the representation tends towards cliché, woman as mother, as prostitute. I wanted to find characters that, if not exactly from mixed backgrounds, are in some ways hybridised, that have different traits. I want something more realistic than the usual representations, the lower class maid, the aristocratic woman thing. The project involves a lot of improvisation exercises with the actors, and there will be some text, but the script itself will hopefully develop from the workshops. I do have a framework, a guideline of what I want the story to look like, rough character analyses that will also be developed within the workshops.
That's stage one. Stage two will be shooting. It will all be on location. No studio will be used. I want a documentary look, and the acting to be very realistic. There will be no sets, the lighting minimal. Hopefully the locations won't need dressing, and the props that are already there will be what we use. I want a naturalistic feel to the work.
A lot of my other work has involved playing with the documentary aesthetic, with real people, and this will be different in as much as there will be actors, but I will still keep some of the vérité of documentary shooting styles. There will be real places, real people in the background if I shoot in the street. It will keep that documentary feel.
There is, as well, a research component. I'm doing a lot of interviews. One of the characters, it's this girl who wants to be an actress, who is hungry for fame. She is from a poor background but she's able to move within another class environment. She can be invisible, in a way, can move against other backgrounds, and do different things, and in this sense she's an opportunist. And the character is based on someone I know, someone I've interviewed many times. So partly the characters will come out of the research, as a base, and that will help a lot in shaping them in the workshop.
I've been interested in gender and power for some time, in how power is allocated through gender, in how girls survive, in how they go about getting what they want. What makes them, between brackets, sell themselves? What is the system? What underwrites the allocation of power, both in a direct and in a non-direct way? How do these girls deal with each other, and at the same time with the system? It is in this context that class is important, in the context of the things these girls encounter, the things they want, which is why the film will be based on very specific research, on interviews with, for example, women who want to be actresses, or who want to get a job, or want to have a career. What do they go through? I don't mean hardships, I don't mean the whole sleeping your way to the top cliché. I mean how does it concern the family? What is it like for them to live alone? Most of the characters live in a hostel. What does this mean, to be away from the family structure? To be independent? And is it really independence?
The stories will be interwoven, and they are based on research already done. We spoke about the characters who lived in the hostel, and they do come from different backgrounds. For instance there is this girl who comes from an affluent family in Mohandessin. She becomes some kind of an Islamic activist. She is completely veiled from head to toe, and her mother is not veiled and is trying desperately to bring her daughter back home.
Another girl, she's from a rural town, in Cairo to study, and she's quite quiet. And there is the prostitute, and a Sudanese woman, 40 years old, who used to be a professor of sociology, who became an alcoholic, and she works in a brothel. So I'm trying to examine an idea of girls leaving home, girls from different places. These people are not rootless, but I am searching for this hybrid character, a lot of elements in the same character, and I'm interested in looking at how they interact.
I want to shoot in a very realistic, fly on the wall style. I want everything to look realistic, so documentary will play a big part in the style. And even though I don't use real people the research will add to the documentary aesthetic.
It will probably take a year to realise. When you do everything on your own things can be slow. But it is in two stages, so I can split in the middle, do the workshops then wait, and shoot when the funding becomes available.
There might be problems getting shooting permits. The authorities are scared of small projects. I don't have a production company, I am not a commercial venture, and that worries them. My other work has been basically a one-man-one-camera thing. It was completely guerrilla filmmaking. Film, hide in the bushes, film, hide in the bushes again. You see a police man and you run away. But you can't do that with a crew.
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