A sentimental journey
Sonali Pahwa speaks with filmmaker Samir Abdallah about activism, internationalism and the possibilities of solidarity
The Egyptian diaspora in France lacks the definable quality of immigrant groups from elsewhere in North Africa, but it does have its notable characters. A small but significant crew of artists among them maintain a presence on either shore. Some are seasonal residents in Egypt, others birds of passage who incorporate an exhibition or screening into family visits. Filmmaker Samir Abdallah has always been among the latter.
Born in Copenhagen to an Egyptian father and a Danish mother and raised in France, he now has a family of his own with his French- Moroccan wife. On his first trip to Egypt in 28 years, Abdallah has been travelling at a frenetic pace, showing his sons their Egyptian heritage and showing his films as well as the artwork of his father, the late painter Hamid Abdallah, at French cultural centres throughout the country. He is on a mission to make up for lost time.
"Why didn't I come back sooner? Because I'm stupid!" Abdallah says ruefully. "But when you are living abroad and working hard you never seem to have enough time for a proper visit. There was also the problem of language." But now that he has developed an eclectic collection of Arabic dialects through filming documentaries in Palestine and travelling in Morocco, Abdallah feels more at home in Egypt. This September, when his older son finishes his school-leaving exams, the two of them have decided to return to Egypt to study Arabic and re-establish links with the country.
Abdallah attributes his interest in filmmaking to his Egyptian background. He begins, unexpectedly, with a story of his experience of the 1967 War as a schoolboy in France.
"My family had just bought a television set when the war began," he recounts. "It was one of those sets in which you had to put in coins every time you wanted to watch a show. Then there began to appear propaganda pictures on French television -- pictures of the shoes of Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai who had supposedly fled instead of fighting. My father was so angry that he broke the television. We had no other television until I was 17. I think this experience gave me the idea of changing the media, of giving it another image, another voice."
"In 1970 I came to Egypt for the first time. Since my father was an artist, I met filmmakers who were his friends -- including Shadi Abdel- Salam and Salah Abu Seif and the cinematographer Ramsis Marzouk. I went along on film shoots. After my studies ended I wanted to study cinema, especially feature filmmaking. I had a French-Moroccan friend and we had planned to work on a film scenario together. But he was killed by a Frenchman, a former colonial, who lived in the same housing project in Nanterre. Just because he was an Arab. That was the impulse for me to get involved in protest movements, and I left my cinema studies. We fought for better housing and against discrimination. But the media came to cover our activities as if we were a zoo. We decided to put an end to the bad publicity they were giving us by telling our own stories. Some of us took pictures, others wrote, or worked in radio broadcasting. I made a film about this experience, as a gift to my friend."
A series of urban documentaries on struggles for their rights by French immigrants and workers followed. Travels in Peugeot-land (1991) documented strikes in Peugeot factories. The Ballad of the Unauthorised (1996) followed the movement for the rights of illegal immigrants (or sans papiers) from the inside. A more personal film, For Titus (1998), was Abdallah's homage to his young brother-in-law. He had been killed by a neighbour, an incident that impelled Abdallah to show how people inflict on others the violence of which they are themselves victims.
The shift from Abdallah's early activist films to his current preoccupation with Palestine seems logical enough. The movements for French immigrants' rights had won many of their goals, and the French left was expressing increasing solidarity with the disenfranchised in a more global sense. "You cannot reduce France to Le Pen," Abdallah emphasises. "There are committed people here, and important movements close to the concerns of the global South."
The initial impetus for his own turn towards filming Palestine was the widespread celebrations in 1998 of the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel, to the exclusion of any discussion of the Palestinian catastrophe.
And so Abdallah embarked upon a pair of films intended to provide alternative histories. His short documentary, 1948, The Expulsion (1998), was based on an interview with Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar. Then he went to the camps of Shatila and Ain Helweh in Lebanon to gather a range of unofficial histories from the past 50 years for his next film, We Will Return Some Day (1999).
It was not long after these thematically modest endeavours that Abdallah delved again into the on-the-ground activism on which he seems to thrive. The International Civil Campaign for the Protection of the Palestinian People became the new emblem of resistance in his films.
"I made my first trip with them in June 2001," he relates. "The idea was to be in contact with Palestinian civil society on the ground, not with officials, and to offer practical, protective solidarity." This effort ranged from everyday tasks such as harvesting olives to protesting house demolitions.
On his whistle-stop tour of Egypt Abdallah has screened two of the three films he developed out of his extended engagement with this solidarity mission. Writers of the Borders: A Voyage in Palestine(s), co-directed by José Reynes, is the account of a trip to Palestine made by members of the International Parliament of Writers to assert their solidarity with founder-member Mahmoud Darwish when he was not allowed to travel to attend their conference. These included Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, José Saramago, Russel Banks and others.
"The film is composed out of their travel pictures and the stories they all wrote about the experience," Abdallah explains. "It is consequently in eight languages. One may believe that everything and nothing is important, but this event of writers coming together is, I think, historic. We hope this is a first step in an important movement of intellectuals and artists uniting to make their weight felt with governments. They can contribute their weight as citizens of the world. One has to take a stand and say no to governments."
The second film by Abdallah on tour in Egypt is Diary of a Siege, filmed when he and other members of the International Solidarity Movement were trapped in Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah when it was besieged in April 2002.
For all his restless internationalism, Abdallah is surprisingly skeptical about the prospects for binational coproduction in film as a solution to Egypt's current crisis, for instance. "It is a problem that Arab production is so heavily dependent on European or American systems of production and distribution," he frowns. "There should be stronger production companies here. A foreign co-producer will tend to make you cut corners. We have similar problems in Europe, where funding for the arts has been reduced to a quarter of what it was, and many artists cannot work viably any more."
"But when you are forced to come up with solutions, it keeps you creative. We made Writers on digital camera. My production company is called L'yeux ouverts -- a pun that suggests both open eyes and open spaces. We screen films in libraries, schools, cafés, and keep our operations economical. We distribute our films on videotape. Ballad was distributed in 3,000 tapes, first in France and then in Italy and Germany. We made more money this way than if we had sold the film rights to a television station. And Siege had more impact after public screenings than when it was shown on television. When people are gathered together to watch a film, they have a greater sense of community and solidarity."
This is the kind of internationalism through film that Abdallah endorses. "Since the beginning of the second Intifada," he notes, "the Palestinian issue has become more than a Palestinian or Arab concern. It is getting to be a human issue that is part of the universal consciousness. When we were inside the Muqata'a in April 2002, we heard that Indians in Peru had held demonstrations in solidarity with us. This urged me to organise a festival of films about Palestine that would travel internationally."
Returning to efforts to re-engage with his own sentimental homeland, Abdallah has a more personal mission on this trip. He is working on getting his films subtitled in Arabic so that they can be shown more widely in Egypt. They have been screened in Morocco, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Tunisia, and just twice before in this country. Translation will help matters. "What I really want to do," he grins, "is to show my films in my father's village, Al-Awamiya, near Sohag."
