Middle East - Anthony Ham [62]
For all the gloom that has hung over the local film industry in recent years, Egypt’s creative talents have set about reclaiming the country’s once-undisputed title as the Middle East’s cinematic powerhouse. The revival relies on a bold, ground-breaking willingness to confront social taboos in a way that few Egyptian filmmakers have dared for decades. For more details, see the boxed text, below.
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Popular Egyptian Cinema, by Viola Shafik, demystifies all the melodrama of mainstream Egyptian films, placing them in their historical context and opening a window on the Egyptian soul in the process.
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Despite signs that the Egyptian government censors are lightening up, directors in the country must still be wary of a conservative backlash. The portrayal of a lesbian kiss in Until Things Get Better saw the director Khaled Youssef threatened with arrest on moral grounds.
The new trend towards controversial subject matter must have come as music to the ears of Youssef Chahine, Egypt’s premier director for more than half a century. This Alexandria-born stalwart of international film festivals, who died in Cairo aged 82 in June 2008, directed over 40 films in an illustrious career that saw him given the lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997. Known for championing free speech and for his willingness to take on authoritarian Egyptian governments, Western meddling in the Middle East and religious fundamentalism, Chahine, more than any other figure, laid the foundations for the brave new world of Egyptian cinema. His final film Heya Fawda (Chaos; 2007), which confronted police brutality and corruption, was a fitting epitaph to a stirring career.
Israel & the Palestinian Territories: Worlds Apart
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Arab Film Distribution (www.arabfilm.com) is the Amazon.com of Arab cinema, with a large portfolio of DVDs that you just won’t find on the shelves of your local rental store.
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The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians not surprisingly weighs heavily upon films from this troubled land, but some outstanding movies have emerged from both sides of the divide. There is rarely conflict between the directors from these two cultures, as most tend to belong to the liberal, more-moderate strands of Israeli and Palestinian society.
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New Egyptian Cinema – three films
The first sign that Egyptian film was entering new territory came with The Yacoubian Building, a 2006 adaptation of Alaa al-Aswany’s novel of the same name. Egyptian film audiences had rarely seen anything like it, with the issues of homosexuality, police torture, government corruption, sexual violence and terrorism all being highlighted through the prism of tenants’ lives in an ageing Cairo apartment block. Directed by Marwan Hamed, the film provoked protests from conservative sectors of Egyptian society. The director’s response was to argue that, ‘We need to talk about the taboos, and we need to cancel the word “taboos” from our lives.’ The film broke box-office records.
That a willingness to confront taboos was no passing fad became evident in 2008 when Hassan and Morqos was released. The film, which stars Egyptian-born Omar Sharif and comic legend Adel Imam – better known for slapstick movies of questionable quality – follows two moderates, a Muslim preacher and a Coptic priest, forced to go into hiding and swap roles to avoid the extremists in both communities. The movie tackled head-on tensions between Egypt’s Muslim and Coptic Christian communities and Adel Imam showed particular courage in his portrayal – he has been accused