Swiss time
Hani Mustafa dips into the Swiss Film Festival in Cairo
For most of the year, the viewer in Egypt is condemned to films that are either mainstream Egyptian or mainstream American. Only during festivals is there fare from any other part of the world. Credit should go to Marian Khoury, who heads Cinemania, a division of the Misr Al Alamiya Company, for organising several experimental events to relieve the boredom of Egyptian film lovers.
A few years ago Khoury launched the European Film Festival, later renting out a movie theatre in one of Nasr City's many cinemaplexes to screen a new non-American film every two weeks. Last week, in collaboration with Pro- Helvetia, the Swiss Cultural Centre, she put together a week of Swiss film screenings covering a period from 1990 until the present. Of particular significance are the many documentaries on the programme and how well attended they have been, perhaps because several of them were political, providing a window on Swiss culture few Egyptians could be familiar with.
Among these were two films by director Richard Dindo, Genet in Chatila and Che Guevara: The Bolivia Diaries, based on books by the French writer Jean Genet and the Argentinean revolutionary Che Guevara. During the discussions following the screenings, Dindo said he depends on biographies and documents as material for the "pictures" later presented in his films.
In The Bolivia Diaries, Dindo records the last year of Guevara's life -- during which he tried to mobilise a guerrilla force and conduct armed revolutions in Latin American countries starting with Bolivia. As a prelude to this period, the director sheds some light on Guevara's own contradictions as Cuban minister of industry. At the time the American economic embargo on Cuba was tightening and he wanted to take the socialist revolution to the rest of the world.
The film starts with stock shots of Guevara before 1966-1967, the time he was in Bolivia. We hear and see parts of his speech during the declaration of the new Cuban. His key statement was that destroying the dictatorship was easy but the difficult task is to build socialist society. His trips in the 1960s aimed at developing the concept of internationalism after success in Cuba.
He travelled to Congo and Moscow while developing the idea of fighting imperialism in the whole world, starting with Latin America. When he returned to Cuba he wrote a farewell letter to his wife and children and his comrade, Fidel Castro. The director concentrates on the letter that he sent to Castro, which Castro read in public to convey Guevara's message to the people of Cuba.
But the film actually starts with news of Guevara's death in a Bolivian village and the sight of his body stretched before a Bolivian officer holding the diaries that were found on him. The director then moves through these diaries by travelling and shooting at the locations through which Guevara and his armed men had travelled and fought in the mountains and forests of Bolivia.
Dindo employs a narrator who reads from the diaries representing Guevara, sometimes inserting interviews with farmers who witnessed the events in an attempt to rebuild a visual image of the places Guevara and his army passed. Produced in 1996, the film won the audience award in the Arizona Film Festival in 1998. Impressive though it remains, the process of retracing the journey can be repetitive at times and the rhythm of the film is too slow and quiet for its subject.
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Genet in Chatila which was produced in 1999 is similar to Guevara. The director borrows the text of Genet's last work, Prisoner of Love, which he wrote after returning from Beirut and before his death in 1986. It was his first work in 20 years and he produced it while he was terminally ill with throat cancer.
As an introduction to the film, the director presents the events that correspond with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982: the Israeli siege of Beirut and the departure of the Palestinian resistance forces, followed by the assassination of the leader of the Lebanese Falangist Party, Bashir Gemayel, who has been elected as president by the parliament a few days earlier.
Dindo moves onto the main event of the film, the Sabra and Chatila massacre committed by Falagist party forces under the supervision of the Israeli army. Dindo superimposes Genet's poetic text on scenes of the camp alleys and buildings combined with shots of the aftermath of the massacre, frequently following Genet's back to 1970-1971 when he accompanied the Palestinian resistance during the notorious crisis with the Jordanian army known as Black September.
The director needs a dramatic excuse for looking for the places and people that Genet visited in Jordan and Lebanon, so he adds the character of French-Algerian girl who is looking for these places and has her speak to the different people. This character is not, however, organically integrated into the rest of the film.
The most important segment of the film concentrates on a Palestinian fedaye who hosted Genet in his house, and whom Genet calls Hamza. Dindo tries to recreate the scenes evoked by the beautiful text. It is the film's best part.
The director should have stopped here and allowed the imagination of the audience to complete the relationship that emerged between Genet and this Palestinian family; the fighter and his mother, who used to offer Genet food and drinks in total silence when her son was away on military operations. Instead, he makes the Algerian girl look for Hamza, only to find out through his brother and sister that he has immigrated to Germany after being arrested, tortured and released by the Jordanian authority, and that mother has died.
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But perhaps the more important film among these documentaries screened is Forget Baghdad by the Iraqi-Swiss director Samir Jamaluddin (credited only as Samir). This documentary relies mainly on interviews that the director conducted with Iraqi Jewish immigrants to Israel, whom he found in the process of looking for his father's comrades in the Iraqi Communist Party. Three of them are Iraqi intellectuals and writers such as Shimon Ballas, the writer and Arabic professor in Tel Aviv and the novelist Sami Michael, Moshe Houri, a realtor, and Samir Nakkash, who publishes only in Arabic, in addition to the researcher and film historian Ella Shohat.
Jamaluddin used a method of cinematography that seems confusing at times as he films his subjects at the edge of the screen, leaving the rest for archival shots.
Through these archival shots and old footage the director seeks to portray what his subjects are saying about their personal experiences in Iraq and Israel. The film is therefore divided into the suffering of the Iraqi people as a whole during the British occupation and the resistance movement, to which the communist party was instrumental.
The second part concerns the time after these men have departed to Israel. Feelings and details are intertwined including the Marxist upbringing to which the characters were subject in Iraq during the 1930s and 1940s. This is especially attractive as it reveals a high degree of tolerance in Iraqi society at that time.
The film moves to what happened under the Rashid Ali government in Iraq. This pro-Nazi, fascist government caused a lot of prejudice against Iraqi Jews, depriving many of them from the Iraqi nationality and forcing them to immigrate to Israel. In the next part of the film the director reveals the state of prejudice and racism against these Iraqis in Israel, where they are viewed as Arabs.
Jamaluddin uses stock shots from Israeli promotional films dating back to the early 1950s to generate irony regarding what happened in Israel at the time. In addition to the promotional film there was a feature film titled Salah Shabati produced in Israel in 1964 by the director Ephraim Kishon, who won a Golden Globe in 1965, which agrees totally with the views expressed by the present documentary.
There are many humane scenes in the film including the parts where Samir Nakkash talks about the Arab bread and food replaced with European. In the most dramatic scene of the film, Sami Michael recalls being a guest of Israeli television during the Gulf War in 1991 to give an opinion on Saddam Hussein who was bombing Tel Aviv with Scud missiles. During that interview Nakkash said that when he saw the destroyed bridge over the Tigris River he felt like a Bedouin seeing his favourite horse killed. The film won the critics award at the Locarno Film festival in 2002.
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