The dangerous edge of things
Rania Gaafar speaks with Egyptian-German filmmaker Samir Nasr, whose debut feature will be screened as part of the CIFF
Samir Nasr was born in 1968 in Germany to an Egyptian father and a German mother. As a child his family moved to Libya, where they lived for four years, and Nasr subsequently attended school in Cairo. He graduated in Business Administration in Germany, following which he applied to various film schools and was finally accepted by Germany's prestigious Filmakademie in Ludwigsburg, where he specialised in documentary filmmaking. Nachttanke (Night Station), the documentary he made in his final year of study, was shown at several film festivals and garnered a number of prizes. His debut feature Folgeschöden (Seeds of Doubt), recently shown on German television, is to be screened at the Cairo International Film Festival.
Folgeschöden has already won several awards in Germany, including the CIVIS Media Award, presented for work that promotes cultural diversity, coexistence, integration and tolerance in Europe, and the Tankred-Dorst Award. Folgeschöden -- literally translated it means damaging after-effects -- begins at the point of intersection where seemingly fixed notions of identity crumble under the pressure of politics, the place Graham Greene termed "the dangerous edge of things".
"The original script of the film," says Nasr, "was radically different from the final version", so much so that he was unsure whether the TV editors who had commissioned him would want to continue with the project after he had voiced his objections to the original plot. The original script included a secret agent from Pakistan who enters the life of a German woman married to a Muslim man, and then followed the gradual radicalisation of the husband. Nasr suggested that the story should be changed drastically in order to avoid the clichés about Arabs common in German TV and film, and in such a way as to show the intrusion of politics into the relationship between a man and a woman from different cultures. He wanted to shoot a love story that would appeal to the spectator, emotionally as well as visually. "I like to create an atmosphere of complicity between the spectator and the camera and then expose the spectators at the end of the film, showing them that they have been involved in a process of stigmatising someone out of sheer ignorance."
Weeks of silence followed Nasr's initial objections to the script and he had already forgotten about the project when he was contacted once more by the producers. They agreed on the basic plot: Tariq, an Algerian Muslim living in post-9/11 Germany and married to Maya, a German woman, suddenly becomes embroiled in politics when he finds himself the subject of police surveillance.
Nasr is a conservative and pragmatic filmmaker. He favours clear, cleanly cut films. He does not take his audience on a conducted tour of experimental film aesthetics intended to subvert their expectations, nor does he engage in shaky Dogma--like camera shots. There are no narrative ellipses, no traces of the melancholy so characteristic of German auteur films portraying fallen angels in soulless urban landscapes as they engage in a futile search for love. Folgeschöden is a TV movie, heir to the long and successful tradition of TV crime thrillers. Narrative continuity remains uninterrupted until the unexpected denouement uncovers the story and reveals the spectator as an accomplice in crime.
"The spectator sees the whole story through Maya's eyes; she is the main protagonist, the one who undergoes a painful development - from loving wife to police informer, and finally realises that she was wrong. The spectator usually identifies with protagonists who undergo change," says Nasr.
The basic plot is simple, occasionally bordering on kitsch, especially when Nasr tries to elaborate visually on emotions between the couple and on Maya's cultural ignorance of Tariq's Algerian background. Tariq Slimani, played by Algerian actor Mehdi Nebbou, is a cosmopolitan scientist living in Hamburg -- he speaks German with a French accent -- where he is conducting research on ebola viruses. His wife Maya is a successful art director and they have a son, Karim. The film opens with the couple preparing to go out for dinner. So far so good, but the atmosphere at the dinner party with Maya's colleagues and editor-in- chief is tense: Maya's boss makes anti-Muslim comments, telling Tariq that after 9/11 he read the Quran and came to the conclusion that Islam was a backward religion. Tariq responds with seemingly insouciant sarcasm, but the dinner party provokes the first crisis in Maya and Tariq's hitherto idyllic relationship as Maya, the good-willing, blonde provincial wife with no idea of where her husband comes from or what he goes through begins to realise that her husband is no longer willing to silently accept this sudden hostility for the sake of peace.
Then the unimaginable happens: Maya's angry superior denounces Tariq to the police, reporting his allegedly anti-American comments. The police then discover, via a video of a wedding party, that Tariq had attended the same function as one of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. Rumours spread and his son Karim faces growing difficulties at school, where his class mates begin to describe his father as a terrorist.
Tariq is then denied entry to the US, where he has been invited to give a guest lecture at Harvard. Finally his jealous, and soon to be jobless, assistant Doro lies to the police about the loss of virus stems from the laboratory, implicating Tariq in the hope of taking his place. Tariq is accused of having stolen the viruses to plan attacks in Europe. Cornered, Tariq seeks to leave Germany, considers returning to Algeria, but then heads for Paris. Meanwhile, his relationship with Maya is unravelling, who finally agrees to cooperate with the police who persuade her of her husband's guilt and convince her to spy on him.
"I was very much influenced by the political films of Costa Garvas, and those of Salah Abu Seif. They are films that could never be termed realistic; they condense and compress reality into an artistic mode," says Nasr. But then, he adds, "film never depicts reality; it is a fictional medium". Nasr's vision of politics is one of a politics of emotions, however flat the perception. He sees Folgeschöden as a thoroughly political film because of a love that is put to the test within the absurd framework of world politics. His film hastily touches on the memory of Algeria when, in a dark basement where the couple escape from a party to finish a loud argument Tariq recalls a traumatic image. It is the first time he discloses it to his wife, telling her of the day in Algeria that French troops forced their way into the house searching for his father. When they drag him from his hiding place beneath his bed Tariq sees that his father has wet his trousers in fear. He tells Maya that he never wants his son to see him in a similarly desperate situation, but he also tells her that he is dying of fear. This powerful colonial subtext is not elaborated or in other sequences -- it is dropped as suddenly as it arises.
The climax of the film comes in the most dramatic -- and Nasr's favourite -- scene when Maya pulls the apartment apart as she searches for Tariq's ticket to Paris. Her reluctant answer to his desperate question -- whether she really believed he was involved in the crime -- shatters him. Tariq leaves having lost everything -- job, reputation and wife - but then returns. The film, it seems, required a happier ending. The final shot shows the couple walking hand in hand along cliffs in front of the open sea. Unfortunately there is too little room in the film for allegory, and the overworked symbol of the sea fails to provide a sufficiently meaningful image.
Tariq is in a Catch 22 situation: "The most difficult thing for Tariq in the film is that he looks rather European, behaves European, is married to a German woman and still, because he appears so harmless, he is considered dangerous. Ultra-conservative politicians such as Gènther Beckstein (CSU) declared after 9/11 that Germans should be watchful when meeting and friendly and inconspicuous Arabs," explains Nasr.
Egypt -- despite Nasr's deeply-rooted Western upbringing, which does not prevent him from criticism of both sides -- remains a point of reference in his work. He is currently working on a documentary -- Abdel-Halim Hafez and Songs of the Revolution ( Abdel-Halim Wa Aghani El-Thawra ) in which he will trace Egyptian history from 1952 until 1970 through the music of Abdel-Halim. "The question I was asking myself is why it is that patriotic songs -- and Abdel-Halim's songs were propaganda -- are no longer heard in any other part of the world yet they remain so popular in Egypt. Abdel-Halim Hafez would certainly not have seen the songs as propaganda. How did he manage to make these songs alive for us even today when the reality we live has proved so painfully different from past expectations?"
And there is more to come. Nasr's next film project will be an adaptation of Sonallah Ibrahim's novel Sharaf which, he says, made a great impression on him in terms of frankness and courage. He will write the script, again a portrait of Egyptian society reflected from within prison walls, with Bahab El-Seema author Hani Fawzi.
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