In progress:
Journeys in time
By
Hani Mustafa
Ahmed Maher graduated from the Higher Cinema Institute in 1991. Since his graduation project, Milad Ams (Birth Yesterday), he has directed several short and documentary films, including the widely acclaimed Alamat Ibril (April Signs, 1999) and Kull Yom (Every Day, 2002). Maher's films have been screened at many festivals and he has received several awards, including the State Award for Creativity in 1993 which provided a bursary for three years in Rome.
The cinema business doesn't respect time boundaries in the way that other art forms might. A project doesn't take three weeks or even two months. And anyway, at least in my case, it would be impossible to understand what I'm doing now without going back many years, all the way to my stay in Italy. The first few months were difficult due to the fact that, beyond the notion of art students living in Rome for a period of time, the grant did not provide a specific plan of action. Eventually I managed to make contact with a young filmmaker, with whom I wrote the script for one of his films. I also began to travel widely in Europe, attending festivals and seeking out cinema. Yet arguably the most important consequence of my stay in Italy was that I thought of relying on European funds for the production of my first full-length feature, which I have finally completed and given the title Min Dahr Ragel (Created in My Form); European funding seemed to be the answer because only particular kinds of films are supported by the production market in Egypt.
I had been working on it for three years, juggling ideas, writing and rewriting constantly till I reached the present structure. The process started at about the time Alamat Ibril began to crystallise. This was an extremely busy but very productive period, at least in terms of coming up with a final structure for Min Dahr Ragel. This is always a peculiar time, a combination of excitement and calm. Following the anxiety and fear of failure that besets any artist towards the completion of a work, in this case compounded by the fact that the cinematic language used in Alamat Ibril was distinctly different from that in which the Egyptian viewer is trained, it was easy to think of the next project. At the time a number of colleagues were encouraging me to seek funding for a script I had written in Rome in 1996 -- it went by the title Minal- Zaman Al-Samit (Of Silent Time) -- but I hadn't touched that for three years and had been in a completely different state of mind at the time of writing it. Involuntarily, almost, I opted for something new altogether.
Perhaps the reason the script of Min Dahr Ragel took so long to complete was that I wasn't entirely free to do it at the time, particularly during 2000 and 2001, when I produced a large number of advertisements and documentaries. To me the most valuable of these is undoubtedly Bait Al-Aakhar (The Other's House), which I made in Rome days after 11 September 2001. It embodies a personal perspective on the effects of the disaster on a city in which I had spent some of the most important years of my professional life: the feelings of alienation to which an Arab was prone in Europe and especially in Rome, where ethnicities and ideological orientations, from the extreme right to the extreme left, coexist; the weird tenor of life on the morning of 12 September. Fortunately I was helped by two Italian friends, script-writer Angela di Mari and producer Marcello Bono. In December I came back to Cairo with two burdens on my back: the feelings the experience had instilled in me, and the first, 200- scene (i.e. three and a half hours') version of the script of Min Dahr Ragel, which required several critical modifications as well as cutting.
I had concerns about the so-called debut syndrome, which manifests in young directors who want to say all that they will ever have to say in one feature film, their first. I started reworking the script, which I completed finally last December; ironically it was December in Rome once again, exactly a year after my hapless return. I knew another, arduous journey awaited me at the end of this particular tunnel, as soon as I completed the script -- the search for production. I was, still am, a little pessimistic about Egyptian production companies, which operate in a confused manner, professing different standards. I had already made contacts in Italy, showing the script to two production companies in Rome and Milan; even though it is distinctly different from the kind of Arab or Iranian film they produce, I was surprised to find them both enthusiastic. And with this initial go-ahead procured, to answer your initial question, what I am doing now is going through the process of casting, contacting people like Maya Sansa from Italy, the Tunisian actress Hind Sabri, Mahmoud Hemeida, who is my first candidate for the lead, and several other well-known actors. This too will be a long task, to be followed by others similarly arduous. But having come so far I am determined to reach the end of this road. It is, after all, my first destination.
