Searching for an Exit

ِAlthough Hesham Issawi was born in Egypt, the seasoned director has only just plunged into the independent film scene in his home country with Cairo Exit — a feature-length movie about a woman’s agonizing choice of following the man she loves or keeping their unborn child. Just as his characters struggle against obstacles in the way of their pursuit of a better life, so has Issawi’s first Egypt-based storytelling attempt taken him up against security and censorship authorities, perhaps giving him a taste of the conditions that his movie is trying to portray.

When Egypt Today last sat down with Issawi in 2007, he was still relishing the success of his first feature film AmericanEast, set in Los Angeles and screened at several festivals around the world, including the Cairo Film Festival. Around the same time, Issawi met Sherif Mandour, a director (Howa Fi Eih, [What’s the Problem] 2003) who also produced two critically acclaimed independent pictures, Ibrahim El-Batout’s Ein Shams (2008) and Ahmad Abdallah’s Heliopolis (2009). The meeting proved serendipitous for Issawi. After watching AmericanEast and two of Issawi’s short films,The Interrogation and T for Terrorist, Mandour was ready to see more from the up-and-coming director. After reading the screenplay for Cairo Exit, Mandour offered to back it. Issawi has been living in the United States since the in 1990s, and Cairo Exit is his first attempt to tell a story based and filmed in Egypt. “I had a couple of scripts in the writing process but I decided to focus on Cairo Exit because it was a social drama that is different from my three previous films that were set in political contexts,” explains Issawi. “Cairo Exit was inspired by the daily stress, street traffic and the overpopulation I witnessed during my trips to Cairo. Of course, the darker side of many cities where marginal people live in the shadows has inspired many filmmakers, most notably Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver. So the challenge was to combine these local elements in realistic film that resonates with today’s audience.” The main character in the film is Amal, an 18 year-old Coptic woman who delivers fast-food on her motorcycle. She is in love with Tarek, a Muslim who plans to illegally immigrate to Italy in search of a better life. Though he wants to take Amal with him, she is hesitant because she is pregnant. Afraid to tell Tarek, Amal decides she must either have an abortion and go with Tarek or keep the baby and lose Tarek forever. The film takes place in a single day of their lives as Amal struggles to choose between her unborn baby and the love of her life. Although there is much hype about independent films being shot in Egypt nowadays, there still isn’t much funding available for these types of projects. Issawi says he was lucky that Mandour was willing to back the film because the international production company Distant Horizons that backed AmericanEast turnedCairo Exit down, as did both the Berlin and Geneva festivals. “Mandour and I get along because he likes to act as a producer in all senses of the word. Not only did he provide the financial resources, but he is also involved in the writing and the shooting of his films. He brought in writer Amal Afifi to polish certain scenes and improve the dialogue to give it a more Egyptian flavor.” According to Issawi it could take more than a year to convince European and American production entities to give directors financial support. “Also, before I met Mandour, I handed the script to one or two major Egyptian companies but they also demanded many changes to make it more commercial, which would have also increased the budget.” Issawi’s vision was to shoot a guerrilla-style movie without all the extras blockbusters are known for. “The concept of independent cinema or shooting on location with a few crew members and [mixing] character actors and newcomers is yet to be understood by big regional producers,” he notes. “The script and the [shooting style] are the real stars in such films, including mine.” Roadblocks Behind the Scenes A few weeks after Mandour signed on, Issawi began casting and then called up his collaborator and director of photography Patrik Thelander who, like Issawi, is based in the US. The first challenge was finding the actors. A movie like Cairo Exit does not rely on big-name stars, but on character actors who bring life to the script, which made casting the two leads difficult. “Mohamed Ramadan was our first choice to play Tarek, given his good performance in Ehky Ya Scheherazade (Tell Us, Scheherazade, 2009),” Issawi explains. “But it took us a while to find a young woman with an authentic Egyptian look to play Amal.” After many casting calls, Issawi found Marihan, who he says developed a very good chemistry with her on-screen lover. “[They were so good that] director Khaled El-Haggar cast both of them again as lovers in his film El-Shoq (Lust) that started to shoot afterwards,” he explains. Yet Issawi and Mandour did not completely shy away from star power: Comedian Ahmed Bedeir plays Amal’s abusive stepfather, while Moroccan actress Sanaa Mouzian plays Amal’s veiled Muslim friend. Issawi began filming Cairo Exit in April 2010, but soon ran into delays and other obstacles. “Mandour handed the script to the censors, but we started to shoot before getting their final approval,” the director admits. “We had to because everything was ready, the casting was finalized and Patrik had arrived from the US. I ended up shooting 60 percent of the movie in 18 days with no location permits and no censor certificate.” Because the team was shooting with a handheld digital camera, they were able to do much of the filming without attracting much notice. When police did approach them, Issawi says that they either fled the area after finishing the scene or offered a tip to encourage them to look the other way. “I remember when we shot in places like Saft El-Labban or Dar El-Salaam, we told the people we were doing a documentary or we were scouting locations,” Issawi recalls. “But one day, while we were shooting a scene during a real wedding, someone caught us on a mobile phone camera and tipped off the censors.” The making of Cairo Exit was put on hold for months until the production team got the final approval from the censors. Though the censors initially demanded that Issawi omit the religious affiliations of the characters, he refused to make any changes to the original script. Even though the film has already been screened as-is at the 2010 Dubai Film Festival in December, local sensitivities after the January 1 church attack in Alexandria could make it more difficult for Cairo Exit to get permission to be screened in Egypt. Issawi had to rush through the editing and post-production process to meet the deadline of the Dubaifestival. However, his hard work paid off, with Cairo Exit garnering good reviews from major international publications at the premiere. Whether Cairo Exit is released locally or not won’t influence Issawi’s decision to produce another film inEgypt. Instead, he will continue to let the stories drive his creative process. “Really it is about the story,” he says. “When I find a good story, I can go and seek resources for it to be made. A few years ago, I had many screenplays that dealt with political and social issues, but they became outdated because politics completely changed the focus of the stories,” he says. His next project promises to avoid modern politics: Issawi is planning to make a fantasy-horror film set in Ancient Egypt.