Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture | Deah's many Children

		24 - 30 October 2002 Issue No. 609 Culture	Current issue Previous issue Site map
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Deah's many Children
Mohamed El-Qalyoubi speaks to Mohamed El-Assyouti about Kharif Adam (Adam's Autumn), one of two Egyptian features in the Cairo International Film Festival's official competition

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Adam's Autumn (2002), Mohamed El-Qalyoubi
Mohamed El-Qalyoubi's latest film, based on several short stories by Mohamed El- Bosati, the principle being Ibn Mawt (Son of Death), marks a thematic departure in the work of this left-leaning director and academic. El-Qalyoubi's work is driven by an underlying sense of social-political obligation, which he ably prevents from seeping through the surface, as much as by any aesthetic consideration. El-Qalyoubi's first adaptation of El-Bosati, a long-standing friend, is constructed of various narrative strands -- script-writer Alaa Azzam wove several short stories into the central framework provided by Ibn Mawt -- and transported from its original setting in the countryside surrounding Al-Manzala Lake to Upper Egypt.
"Salah Marie [the set designer / art director] recreated the atmosphere very accurately. A lot of research went into the way people dressed and the architectural styles of the village houses, down to the ages of the actors and the inflections of their voices -- everything, over the 20 year period during which the action takes place" --the politically charged period from 1948 to 1968 -- says the director.
It may be provocative of him to represent Egypt with a film on tha'r (blood feuds), but should Kharif Adam (Adam's Autumn) be understood as a straightforward social comment?
"The film has a tha'r theme," he concedes, "but it is not meant to treat tha'r as such. Some people took the film to be a cinematic attempt to address the issue, as it were, but no film, not even 20 films can address an issue of this kind. Education and culture, all kinds of disciplines other than cinema can be employed in the treatment of such phenomena. The film revolves around a tha'r event, but it does so solely in order to talk about this notion that it is in the nature of tha'r for the people involved to be stuck in the past. What the film is about is this idea of settling scores with the past, being buried in the present and thus unable to look to the future."
"The theme of tha'r, for me, typifies the Arab mentality," El-Qalyoubi continues, "which lives in the past. We tend to be too concerned with the past, living on the strength of our past glories. We take pride in a civilisation that's 5,000, 7,000 years old, for example, without for a moment considering whether we are worthy successors, when in fact we disqualified ourselves from the civilisation game a very long time ago. And this is the kind of thing one wants to talk about, and one talks about it through the model of a small, isolated village where the only connection with the world is an old radio at the grocer's and another in the café."
El-Qalyoubi's historical awareness emerges as much in the emotional tenor of his responses as in the ideas underlying the film. "The inhabitants of this village find out about the July Revolution from the radio and, three or four years later, begin to encounter its manifestations," he explains. "But these are the same people who exported so many soldiers, martyrs who were transported on trains along with cattle for the war of 1948 -- only to return dead, decapacitated. And the same thing happens in 1956 and 1967. They know nothing about the world around them, even the wars to which they contribute -- they're completely isolated from them. Instead they are preoccupied with settling family scores from the past."
In making Ibn Mawt Qalyoubi had to overcome several obstacles: "We initially had a problem because the Egyptian countryside has been deformed to the extent that you can argue it no longer exists. The fellahin travel to the Gulf where they make money and the first thing they do on their return is to take down their mud houses and build the ugliest concrete structures imaginable. So the countryside has been destroyed, its features obliterated; our task consisted of creating a convincingly looking village out of five different ones. We also had to harmonise indoor scenes, filmed in the studio, with those outside. This was a major problem, sending us shuttling all over Upper Egypt until we found what we needed."
On several occasions the filming ground to a halt. "The producer, Hisham Ismail, had not been paid a penny by distributors or anybody by the time we had shot half the film. And then we wanted to shoot in a school, and the minister of education decided to make filming in schools illegal; every once in a while he makes that decision, and he'd done it once before while we were filming Ahlam Masrouqa (Stolen Dreams). It took a massive amount of time and energy to secure permission to film in the school."
How does Ibn Mawt compare to El- Qalyoubi's other films?
"I've never made two films that are alike, each is entirely different. So you must consider the total output, variety notwithstanding -- plus my writings and my life itself, which is never separate from what I do. I work in the cinema because I have no other job, sadly I forgot all about engineering even though I got a BSc in it. And if I don't make films I write about cinema, I teach, I see films. The drawback of cinema is that you end up spending your life in dark places, the only breathing space being the time you spend behind a camera, nothing else. This time round I had a wonderful cinematographer, Ramsis Marzouq, and a brilliant set designer for company. Together we lived the film: it's a hard but very rewarding life."
Shot largely in the dark, revolving around death and subtly addressing "the state of terror globalisation gives rise to in the absence of any viable foundations for production or economic well being," Kharif Adam could easily sound depressing. Not so, insists the veteran cinematographer, who has been present throughout. The visual force of the film, he explains, had to be prominent enough to counterbalance the sparseness of the dialogue, and so he resorted to an experimental golden light to film the scenes taking place inside Adam's house. "This created a degree of visual warmth I had not even come close to capturing in earlier films," Marzouq confesses. "In the outdoor scenes I tried to emphasise the beauty of nature and how it contrasts with the restricted, dull lives the characters, and Egyptians in general, tend to lead; that was relatively straightforward."
"The film is not in the least bit depressive," El- Qalyoubi resumes. "It's true we have a lot of night scenes, but Marzouq charged each scene the way Rembrandt charged his paintings, giving prominence to the light. Marzouq's feeling for these paintings informs all the indoor scenes. However sad the subject matter, when you're doing art there is a certain kind of joy that the art itself gives rise to. Even the ugliest subject can project beauty. Even darkness has beauty. And may be it is the only kind of beauty we're allowed as filmmakers."
Adam's Autumn will be screened 9.30pm today at the Artistic Creativity Centre

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