Suggestions of the new
Sonali Pahwa examines works showcased at the third Youth Film Festival
When commercial films are few and far between the work of film students provides an insight into the eventual directions a new generation is tracing. The recent third annual Youth Film Festival at the Goethe Institute offered an intriguing sample by screening graduation projects from Cairo's Cinema Institute alongside a selection of student films from Germany, Austria, Canada and the Netherlands. While the perhaps unintended comparison provided moments of perspective on the limitations young filmmakers are more likely to encounter in Egypt the more resourceful among the Egyptian participants turned constrained circumstances to advantage, producing insightful impressions of youth at a difficult time.
The films, between two and 20 minutes long, were standard format for film school projects. The short feature is demanding on both technical and narrative fronts -- precise editing is necessary to give brief films a feeling of completeness. In compensation, shorts offer the chance to experiment with an idea on a small scale and the participants in the current festival proceeded in a fitting spirit of adventure. The films ranged in genre from animation to hallucination to the kind of minutely observed narrative often seen in short stories.
In the animation category, Ahmed Abu El- Enein's three-dimensional Maalesh and Khaled Shahin's cartoon Dari Meen Dari were technically accomplished, though they appeared to be segments of larger films in which a narrative would eventually be defined. The impression that at the Institute animation is taught as a technical skill rather than as an end was unavoidable. And this is perhaps true in a wider context, since the German film Das Rad also displayed a marked gap between virtuoso animation and simplistic story line.
By contrast, the necessity of a marriage of technology and art was suggested persuasively in two shorts by Virgil Widrich, Copy Shop and Fast Film. The first, a black-and-white production, presented an hallucinatory world in the manner of early filmmakers more intrigued by the illusionary, even magical, possibilities of cinema than its potential use for realism. A man goes to a copy shop on an errand one morning and after his work is done he photocopies his hand on a whim. Soon there are copies of him walking around and he finds he cannot be unique, however dramatically he asserts his individuality. The film's satirical swipe at reproduction in mass culture is balanced by a kind of wonder at the beauty of repetition which allows for the composition of a film almost entirely from one man's image. This stylish meta-cinematic tribute to technology received an enthusiastic response from the audience. Even more loudly applauded was Widrich's display of technical wizardry in Fast Film, a collage of classic Hollywood images taken on a wild ride through space.
The question of whether film should resemble dream or reality was explored again in Tamer Mohsen's To sleep soundly until 7. Hallucination is framed here within a realistic narrative -- as the dream life of one character -- until it eventually and rather awkwardly takes over the film. A young engineer arrives at the site of a bridge he is going to build and finds an old man living in a shack. Neither is willing to budge an inch. Each time the engineer heads to the shack in a fresh attempt at persuasion he hears nostalgic old film music. But the aura of romance surrounding the old man turns into something darker in subsequent scenes, seemingly hallucinated by the engineer. In these dreams the squatter carries a gun and kills in defence of his turf. A subtext of how variously the peasant's resistance to modernisation is imagined is suggested but never developed. Intriguing as its subject is the film lacks the technical qualities that might have allowed the switches between dream and reality the necessary rhythms to suggest both the allure and terror of fantasy.
Conventional narratives by Cinema Institute students were more successful. Quirky, fresh and funny, they suggest the possible emergence of a refreshingly new sensibility. Among the highlights of this category was Nawara Murad's Night Out, a spunky story of three different women who stake their claims to public space. Beginning at nighttime in a part of Cairo made to look like Manhattan's West Village, the camera follows a young hipster who is out alone, needs to make a phone call and chances upon an older woman sitting on her ground-level balcony. A prim young neighbour joins them and the three women start to caricature what people say about women who go out too much. Then they go for a walk and find themselves at the receiving end of just this kind of treatment from a swaggering band of young boys. The swift shift into insecure territory is resonant for any woman who has felt herself eyed as an intruder in masculine space while simply walking on a Cairo pavement. The spatialisation of the city offers rich cinematic material, and the wonder is that it has not been used more often in Egyptian films.
Mohamed Mustafa's Special Show explores more familiar terrain -- the disillusionment of middle age -- in a film about a director whose adaptation of Sonallah Ibrahim's The Smell of It has received delayed recognition. The exceptionally skillful camera work registers the nuances of hope, bitterness and fear on the face of the aging alcoholic director, who barely speaks a word. A strong and smooth visual narrative carries the film, and the near absence of speech is a particular relief after the painfully distorted soundtracks of the other Egyptian films. Like the narrator of Ibrahim's novella the director, who has fallen into obscurity, seems invisible, an observer rather than a cynosure. The organisers of the special screening of his film do not even recognize him when he attends it. Whether or not you read into this a comment on the fading visibility of the director in the age of movie stars, Special Show affirms the pleasures of solid filmmaking without extra bells and whistles.
Straight-up comedy was provided by Real Japanese and Ali Shawki's Day Off, which added a generational twist to the boyish humour and gender role reversal brands. The distorted soundtrack was difficult to follow in Real Japanese, a film centered on a nerdy adolescent who is swamped by a pushy mother and sister and struggles to be left alone with his ideal woman, a Japanese pin- up girl. The goofy humour and sexual allusions are standard schoolboy genres, but they felt fresh in this context. In Day Off, which inhabits the same interior-decorated milieu as Sahar Al- Layali, a svelte young woman goes off to work in a pinstriped suit and leaves her husband at home. There is an entertaining play with gender roles, beginning with the husband's predictable confusion at the housework and ending with his feminine sulks at being expected to do everything right. This was the only Egyptian entry shot on video and looked like a possible soap opera.
The Egyptian films shown at the festival suggested the emergence of several new voices determined to assert themselves. It is perhaps unsurprising that they focussed on the message rather than the medium of film. But warning sounds must be made regarding the lack of attention to such basic production values as sound. It would have been interesting, too, to see how Egyptian film students framed the politics of filmmaking in comparison with their European counterparts.
To sleep soundly until 7 tentatively raised the question of reflexivity in cinematic representation, while two German filmmakers scrutinised their chosen medium in suggestive ways. Stefan Hering's Picture Maker is a brief narrative of a photographer fascinated by domestic violence to the extent that he cannot respond to a woman's abuse by her husband other than in aesthetic terms. The point that the artist benefits unethically from the violence he represents is not as provocative as the assertion that the documentary impetus in visual representation is itself an invasion, found in critiques of cinéma verité. But it remains a concern in times of widespread brutality.
The politics of visual representation were placed centre-stage in the documentary Tehran 1380 by Iranian-German filmmakers Solmaz Shahbazi and Tirdad Zolghadr. The narrator states that the purpose of this urban sociological documentary is to counter traditional representations of Iran as "an enchanting place full of nightingales and flowers". This unsentimental documentary instead explored the modernist imagination of Tehran's architects and the use of planned spaces by those who live in them. The filmmakers were present for discussion, and judging by the aggrieved questions put to them they had succeeded in denuding Iran of its romance. They were asked why they did not look at the lives behind the surfaces they filmed, and even why women's stories were not given a stronger focus. In effect, why theirs was not the kind of Iranian film international audiences have come to expect. This appears as telling an indication as any that film is the primary terrain on which contemporary battles of representation are fought.
