A year into the Arab Spring and Tribeca, understandably, is still fascinated with the Middle East. The 11th edition of New York’s Tribeca Film Festival (TFF), which ran April 18-29, 2012, once again screened several films from the Middle East in its different sections, but compared to last year’s offerings, the 2012 films failed to do Egypt justice.The 2011 TFF, for instance, screened Hesham Issawi’s Cairo Exit, a Sherif Mandour-produced, feature-length love story between a Muslim and a Christian that is still grappling with Egyptian censorship. This year, three Egypt-related films were screened by relatively unknown filmmakers with connections to the Doha Film Institute (DFI), organizer of the Doha Tribeca Festival in Qatar in association with the TFF in New York. Those familiar with Egypt and its nuances, however, will find the films do not depict a realistic image of Egyptian society, underscoring a shallow and sometimes crude vision in presenting our social and religious habits.
I first saw the documentary The Virgin, the Copts and Me at the Doha TFF last October in Qatar. Director Namir Abdel Messeeh is French from Egyptian origins, his parents having immigrated to France in 1973. During his childhood, his mother told him about an event that occurred in 1968, when thousands of people claimed to witness an appearance of the Virgin Mary in the El-Zeitoun area. Years later, his mother’s story compels the skeptic Abdel Messeeh to return to Egypt to shoot a documentary about the phenomenon. After a few meetings with Church officials and the Coptic community in Cairo, who are unwilling to help, he changes course and travels to his birthplace, a rural Upper-Egyptian village called Om Doma. There, with the help of his mother who comes to join him as producer, Abdel Messeeh convinces the poor, uneducated and naïve community to become the cast for a reenactment of the Virgin’s appearance.
The 38-year-old Abdel Messeeh, who seems to have a Youssef Chahine complex (he speaks in Franco-Arab like him), was treated like a boy wonder in both Doha and New York because of his witty answers to panel questions, and he gained the audience’s sympathy by pretending to not know what he was doing. But Namir is not as humble as he pretends to be, for his clearly staged film is more of a mockumentary making fun of religious beliefs while selling a bad image of Egypt to the West. It also has shallow, one-sided elements that can only fool viewers unfamiliar with the complexity of religious relations in Egypt. In one scene, Abdel Messeeh’s Coptic parents proudly announce that they were not believers; later, his mother announces that Copts are the real Egyptians. Cut to a Cairo scene where Namir’s Egyptian friend assures him that here in Egypt, “Copts hate Muslims and Muslims hate Copts.”
In a panel that followed the screening of the film, Namir, who was joined by filmmakers like Andrew Lund and Rula Jebreal, surprisingly expressed his wish to show this film in Egypt — something unlikely to happen given the subject matter and how it’s portrayed.
Continuing its mission to initiate a film industry in Qatar, the DFI co-produced A Falcon, A Revolution, a six-minute short by two young Qataris MD Rezwan Al Islam and Jassim Al Rumaihi, who present a story about the Egyptian Revolution viewed from the perspective of a Bedouin falcon trainer. Although the premise seems interesting, the two filmmakers are unable to conceptualize it in such condensed running time. Once you have seen it, you will forget it.
The third film that attracted my attention was an 11-minute short called Café Regular, Cairo. Although shot in Egypt with local actors Mai Abozeed and Alaa Ezzat, the writer-director Ritesh Batra is an Indian making his directing debut. The film is notable for two reasons: its narrative incoherence and its portrayal of sexual depression among Egyptian couples. In an attempt to make the film seem true to life, the two actors play characters with the same names as their own. Mai is a veiled young woman meeting Alaa, her boyfriend of two years, in a Cairo coffee shop. She starts the conversation by telling him about people she heard discussing sex topics during her train ride, which encourages her to complain to Alaa about the fact they have not had any physical intercourse until now. Alaa first seems surprised then becomes willing to locate a place to satisfy Mai’s needs. But the film abruptly ends with Mai revealing that she was just flirting with Alaa.
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Director Batra and the cast did not attend the festival but responded to my questions by e-mail. He mentions that he originally had no plan to shoot a film in Egypt, and the project occurred rather spontaneously, which might explain why the acting felt a tad flat and improvisational.
Batra, whose next project will cover the same topic but set in India, assures me, “I have a great amount of respect and love for Egypt and its culture and people. Some of my good friends are from there and what draws me to it is how similar it is to India. The reason I am telling you this is that I got a sense from your questions that you are offended by the film or that you felt that an outsider like me should not have made this film. […] People can take credit for telling a story and they must, but storytellers don’t choose their stories, it is the stories that choose the storyteller. If I had not told this story, it would have gone looking for another storyteller.”
How did you come up with the story and why did you choose Egypt to shoot it?
I spent a lot of time in Egypt last year as I was teaching for the Doha Film Institute, and I came up with the story while in Egypt after talking and interacting with a lot of my friends there. My actors also helped me a lot by improvising and inserting their personal experiences into the story.
How did you cast the two leads?
An Egyptian filmmaker Mohammed Ramadan helped me to find them. We became friends. […] Mai Abozeed and Alaa Ezzat are very intelligent and sensitive souls, so they were perfect for this part.
Did you get Egyptian censorship’s approval for the script and the shooting?
Our object was not to make a film initially but to just get together to discuss, debate and try to tell a story together. We then realized that we had succeeded a little in our humble attempt to tell a story. Are you offended by this film and story? I mean no disrespect to anyone; these problems and issues exist in every society, including my own.
How did you get the funding for the film?
The film has a zero budget.
The film talks about many problems between couples like sex before marriage, physical abuse and violence. How did you familiarize yourself with such problems in Egyptian society in order to present this film?
These problems exist in every society including my own. We are more similar than we are different. That is what you learn when you travel the world. It is very comforting and discomforting at the same time. When we start to understand another person, culture or place, the only thing of importance we really discover is how similar we are beneath everything that is different. Indian society is currently more materialistic than Egyptian society and also not as idealistic. However, I think we are very similar in all respects.
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