Cinema

‘Blind Ambition’ - A must-see low-fi epic

Jenifer Evans — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 11:26:00 +0000

Hassan Khan’s film “Blind Ambition” reminds me of high drama, westerns, myths, operas. But it’s only 46 minutes long and consists mostly of close-ups of actors out and about in Cairo, spouting lifelike dialogue, shot in a shaky handheld style. There’s no music, hero, love story, weapons, or plot.

There is a momentous silence. There is traffic. Often both at the same time, so the traffic feels historic. There are nine situations, involving nine different sets of characters. They could be everyday encounters, and they are largely tense, disappointing. Inside each encounter, but more conspicuously separating each of them, is the silence and the traffic.

The film is gripping because there is a strange compelling mixture of uncannily real and very artificial. It is set in Cairo, but there is no noise apart from the characters speaking to each other. Something natural — very convincing, sometimes semi-improvised dialogue — has been lifted up, out of the film, and crafted — recorded in a dubbing studio – before being placed back, like a hyperrealist element in an otherwise naturalistic painting.

In a boys’ football game on an unnaturally small informal pitch, their re-made shouts become calm and selected — sporadic noises like in a video game, where a certain action rewards you with a certain sound effect.

The film is also edited to give a barely convincing illusion of real time. The style depends on the nature of the encounter: when the camera follows two young women as they walk down a shopping street arguing, frames have been taken out to speed up the visuals, matching the women’s overlapping retorts. In an upmarket café four colleagues talk, but the camera only sees one at a time: they are isolated, might not even be in the same room.

Each segment can be seen as some sort of power struggle — people positioning themselves in relation to one another. Obsequiousness, threats, patronizing offers of help, people trying it on, lies. Money keeps cropping up in conversation (“let’s buy something,” one of the young women keeps saying) and class differences are evident in the relationships and language. (It’s interesting to see that highlighted now, as a reconsideration of the way class manifests itself in Egypt would be truly revolutionary.)

Another reason the film is gripping is the details, the meticulous specificity of the dialogue, clothes, and locations. It feels like Khan knows loads of people. He is capable of observing, absorbing details and then projecting them with extreme realness and fantasy. Each character is a symbol, yet super lifelike. Most exceptionally, although the camera focuses on them, the characters are not elevated from the crowd or their environment. We are inside the city.

Khan shot his black and white “low-fi epic” using a Samsung phone in 2012. He has no particular interest in mobile phone cinema – “this work made sense to me made this way,” he says. He auditioned more than 100 actors, and chose 27 to appear in the film. He did all the shooting himself except for the transitional scenes which involve entering and exiting some mode of transport, with each actual journey with its patient passengers brutally reduced into a few flashing images. He did all the editing, a skill he has largely taught himself.

In the last encounter, the camera follows a suited man as he walks, the keys swinging from his fingers at the center of the image, and past them the ground. Eventually he comes out above the city, in a café on top of a skyscraper overlooking Ramses Station.

Khan made a short video with the same title in 2005, but shelved it after showing it once. Also with the title is an object used in an installation and a book called “The Agreement” (2011). In the book, very short stories set in Egypt accompany some small objects he commissioned here. Khan says “The Agreement” and “Blind Ambition” are linked through the fact that they are both “detecting a social reality, using it as a material, and transforming it into a suspended state.” In “The Agreement,” he says, this manifested itself in the literary style of the text, and the enigmatic quality of the objects. In “Blind Ambition,” it is in the film’s formal conditions – the silence, its “super constructed” nature. By coincidence, he says, two men from a story in a coffee shop in the book also appear in the film.

The work is being premiered in Egypt tonight, as part of D-CAF. Khan hasn’t exhibited his artwork much (although he regularly shows works in screenings, performs concerts, and participates in public conversations) in Egypt over the past several years because he doesn’t want to compromise the way in which it is shown – the necessary resources are scarce here – but he is now working on the idea of bringing his huge selected survey exhibition shown at SALT, Istanbul, last year, to Egypt. Hopefully for 2014.

People in Egypt will presumably get things in the film that its previous audiences didn’t. They might also be more likely to draw parallels between “Blind Ambition” and the work of Khan’s father, the filmmaker Mohamed Khan, with its atypical heroes and celebration of mundane detail.

One reason D-CAF seemed like a good context in which to premiere the film in Egypt is because it aims to give certain elements of contemporary art mainstream exposure without compromise, Khan says, and “We need to have conversation.” He compared the current situation in Egypt, with its potential for dialogue, to when he started out showing work in the mid-nineties and you had to spend a great deal of energy setting up situations where the public could see your work, in which you were going to be blasted anyway.

Khan also chose to premiere “Blind Ambition” in Egypt as a stand-alone thing rather than within a curatorial framework. After this he doesn’t mind so much where it’s shown. He is happy that the screening will take place at the Radio Cinema, one of Cairo’s old big cinemas which is normally closed, as he went there to watch films as a kid.

Right from the title sequence – old-fashioned big white letters on a black screen – the movie feels like auteur cinema. The combination of real and fake, or spontaneous and constructed, seem to come out of a sideways approach to film as a medium to be taken apart, its parts held up and examined. “It breaks certain film conventions, although not for the sake of it,” he says.

The film shares the uningratiating quality of all of Khan’s works, but it is one of the enjoyable ones. It is enjoyable even when things are moving too fast to understand, because the film is impressively precise and uncompromising.

“Blind Ambition,” in Arabic with English subtitles, will be screened on Sunday at the Radio Cinema at 7pm. The screening will be followed by a conversation and a Q&A session with the audience both moderated by the writer Ahmed Naje.

D-CAF arts festival brings West African cinema to Cairo

Ali Abdel Mohsen — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:06:00 +0000

Two decades ago, the Nigerian film industry was non-existent; today, "Nollywood" produces more films a year than its American namesake and is surpassed only by the Indian film industry — all the more impressive considering these movies are produced without the benefit of a studio system, and that most Nigerian productions are filmed on the streets, or in rented apartments or hotel rooms. Similarly, nations like Burkina Faso and Senegal, where local film industries fizzled out in the face of rising production costs and alienated audiences, are now experiencing a cinematic resurgence in the form of digital, low-budget features, documentaries, and shorts that have been increasingly capturing the attention of film critics, as well as moviegoers across the globe.

As part of this year’s line-up, organizers at the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) have invited Ivorian filmmaker Philippe Lacôte to showcase three examples of recent West African cinema, set to be screened throughout the week at the Goethe Institute in Cairo.

“These films are poor,” Lacôte admits to Egypt Independent of the minimal resources behind each of the efforts. But, as he’s clear to stress, “they’re [each] made by very motivated teams.”

"Espoir Voyage" (Hope Voyage), for instance, is a documentary that sees Burkina Faso filmmaker Michel Zongo on a quest for any information on his brother Joanny who fled his country in search of a better life on the plantations of Cote d’Ivoire and died under unknown circumstances before ever returning home.

It’s an engaging concept; social commentary as a mystery, where each piece of evidence sheds some light on a fractured society, and one that’s made all the more effective due to the director’s personal investment. Before setting out on his search, Zongo explores the conditions that have made the border crossing into Cote d’Ivoire a “rite of passage” for so many young Burkinabe men, as well as the consequences of their exodus. As he “follows the traces” left by his brother eighteen years earlier, recreating the latter’s journey in the hopes of meeting those who might have encountered or known him, the filmmaker moves from cocoa plantation to coffee plantation, and witnesses first hand the difficulties of living the supposed dream.

“Our families think we ride cars,” a Burkinabe worker says to Zongo while, in the background, his colleagues laugh at the very notion. Coffee and cocoa, they explain, each take a long time to grow, and the men typically work for years before seeing the results of their labor. It’s a lifestyle that requires commitment to little else; “Here, when people die or move on, their traces disappear,” Zongo is told. Yet, the filmmaker refuses to abandon his search. “Otherwise,” he explains from behind the camera, “I will not be able to believe my brother is really dead.”

The rite of passage of young men into manhood remains a theme in Lacôte’s second choice, "Boul Falle: The Wrestling Way" — an energetic and, at times, poetic dissection of the Senegalese “sport and music” movement which, since its establishment in 1988, has increasingly become a political force. Director Rama Thiaw follows the stars of the movement, the wrestlers representing various districts, and the owners of the clubs in which they train, for a documentary that is informative if not entirely coherent.

Born out of the people’s lack of faith in the state, the Boul Falle movement is one of creative resistance as much as it is about self-fulfilment, and the documentary is at its best when it broadens its scope; figuratively as well as on technical terms. Too much of the film is shot in extreme, claustrophobic, close-up, and large chunks of time spent on talking heads that don’t seem to have much to say—especially when the subtitles drop out as often as they do. The brief rapping segments are a nice touch but the calmer moments of self-reflection almost wasted on subjects who haven’t been properly distinguished from one another to stand out as relatable individuals. Despite the aesthetic effectiveness of the climax in capturing the spirit of the celebration — the sound alone is incredible — the documentary’s final scenes fail on a narrative level due to a shift in focus, and a poorly-executed ending.

Lacôte’s final choice is the most popular among the three, having been shown “in the only five theatres [in] Ivory Coast,” and now considered “a cult film” among the country’s youth, he explains. The sole feature film in the program, "Burn It Up Djassa" employs documentary techniques to tell the story of a 20-year-old cigarette vendor living in the slums of Abidjan, and his descent into a life of crime. It’s a story undoubtedly inspired by an infinite number of real-life incidents, yet it fails to ring true.

Ironically, most of that failure can be attributed to director Lonesome Solo’s extra pushes at realism, including the on-camera narrator who introduces each of the film’s major scenes by exaggerating the plot points to follow (there is a chance this is a gimmick that needs a specific cultural context for audiences to appreciate). However, the film also suffers from a predictable story based on a coincidence-heavy plot and entire scenes of redundancy that stretch its 70-minute running time.

"Burn It Up Djassa" isn’t to be enjoyed for its story as much as it is for the glimpses it provides — of different lands and familiar societies, of the past and the future. There are several scenes in which 27-year-old director Solo makes his potential clear — as is the case with Thiaw’s "Boul Falle" and, to a greater extent, Zongo’s "Espoir Voyage" — and ultimately, that’s what Lacôte’s choice of films represent the most.

“These works might not be beautiful,” as the curator explains, “but they are most certainly alive.”

“Burn it up Djassa,” “Boul Fallé” and “Espoir Voyage” will be screened again at 7pm on 8, 9 and 10 April respectively. On 10 April, Lacôte will also give a talk on current trends in West African Cinema at 8:30pm. All screenings take place at the Goethe Institut Kairo, 5 Al-Bustan St., Downtown, Cairo.

Hal Badeel festival showcases 10 shorts by Egypt's upcoming filmmakers

Naira Antoun — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:27:00 +0000

A number of short films, ten in all, by upcoming Egyptian directors, each made within the past two years is showing as part of Hal Badeel (Alternative Solution) Festival for Arts in Downtown Cairo tonight.

The organizers of the festival, supported by the Townhouse Gallery, decided that rather than show short films tagged onto other evenings, whether before or after the performance of that evening – the program includes longer films, dance, puppets and theater – that they would dedicate a whole evening to shorts.

The 10 shorts altogether amount to about 110 minutes, a little short of two hours. Although seeing a number of films one after the other can sometimes feel like a bit of a marathon, watching a bunch of shorts together does offer something else. It can bring home just how many different elements doth a good film make. It brings home the importance of even the most tedious elements of film such as subtitling.

All the films to be shown have high production values, but for some it is say stiff acting that holds the film back. Also, in a few films, the subtitling is a piece of the film; in others a smooth script in Arabic does not read well in English. In one a young girl, talking on the phone wants to ask a friend about a boy, she clears her throat somewhat awkwardly. In the subtitling, a note in brackets explains that she is asking about a boy. Moments like this are disappointing.

For films that push the boundaries a little, that leave you with something, one can be a little forgiving when a key element of the film is not quite up to scratch. For those on the more commercial side, they just have to be really good to leave a mark. The script must be excellent, the acting superb; the short is not a story as such, but a depiction of a moment or a state, it should be insightful and it has all got to be smooth.

Of the ten films on show, a few call for attention.

Self-portraits of directors can be a little tiresome and tedious, but Alia Ayman’s “Catharsis” is anything but. Not only is it beautifully shot, Ayman’s script is honest and searing, challenging, to herself as well as to the audience. Her words move between Arabic and English, “it’s bilingual,” she says, “because I am.”

She also states the obvious, so simply, “Why is it that I feel more comfortable on the streets of New York than I do in my own country?” She incorporates what she learnt as a student at the American University in Cairo about cultural imperialism into her developing understanding of the world around her and of herself, as the personal and political inform one another intimately and smoothly.

And lest an audience want to take Alia’s piece as another indictment of society’s conservatism and oppression of women, a rallying cry to break all inhibitions and taboos, or a condemnation of the clutches of traditional families from which we must free ourselves, Alia stops us in our tracks. Inhibitions are as limiting as fears and desires she says. But her concern for her conservative family as she crafts her words, is not inhibition. She says, it is respect and love.

Loosely based on one of the stories or dreams in Naguib Mahfouz’s “The Dreams,” “Zakaraia” is a joy to watch. Emad Maher’s 14-minute black and white short is an ode to absurdity. Often cinematic gestures fail when an actor looks too startled when something deeply strange befalls him or when the soundtrack draws attention to the seemingly weird; these moves can suck the absurdity out. Zakaraia does neither of these.

A man sent to the gallows as if to his wedding day, his mother rejoicing, regretting the father’s absence that he cannot share their joy, the singing smiling tailor, the chickens.

The way in which these elements hang together uninterrupted by any moves pointing to their strangeness, it does indeed succeed as a dream. But more than that, it points to the absurdity not just of our dreams and imaginations, but of life, in an existentialist sense — if the absurd, as Albert Camus famously argued, “is born out of [the] contradiction between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

Neither longer than two minutes, both of Okasha’s animations are deceptively simple. The drawing style, though different in each one, is both sort of rough on the edges as well as being deeply evocative. In “Catharsis,” we really do have a sense we are riding the metro, with the sounds and its jerkiness. And on top of this realistic rendering, the sorts of objects that we do not expect to see on the metro are smoothly thrown in. Equally clever, Okasha’s “Fishing rod,” drawn with crayon and felt-tip has the simplicity of a child-like style. But this is undercut, by a storyline that, while clear in terms of what happens, does not lend itself to one closed reading.

The 10 shorts by Ahmed Abd ElAziz, Nor Abid, Alia Ayman, Walid Badawy, Nesrieen Elzayat, Mohamed Fathallah, Emad Maher, Maged Nader, Okasha and Wassifi will be screened tonight at 8pm at the Townhouse Gallery’s Factory Space, Hussein al-Ma’mar Pasha St., off Mahmoud Basiony St., downtown, Cairo.

Egyptian film provides poetic and impassioned look at Palestine's occupation

Lina Attalah — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:12:00 +0000

Images of the sea and its vociferous waves speak to the uncharted experiences it holds. Images of advertisement billboards in Ramallah speak to a fabricated state of normalcy.

These and some others make of Omar Robert Hamilton’s “Though I Know the River Is Dry” a film that is more than what it is actually about.

Exploring the struggle that a young Palestinian man goes through, between leaving the occupation behind to give his newborn son better chances in America and staying inside next to his brother whose activism promises a tumultuous fate, the film presents one more Palestinian plea.

But it does not end there.

In many ways, like some of the images embedded in the narrative, the film travels in the midst of multiple layers of time and space, trying to resist the fixity that occupation casts upon our imagination.

This, however, does not necessarily happen through recurrent imagery from the repertoire of occupation that persist in the film: checkpoints, queues, crossings, bombings, humiliation, wounds, screams and more. In a way, these images produce and reproduce a rather exhausted notion of occupation as we have grown to understand it, perhaps even as the occupier has driven us to visualize it.

But it is images, both literal and figurative, leaving an array of meanings behind them, which create a different lens into the nature of occupation today. The sea and the city somewhat suspending the flow of occupation, and producing confused realities, are cases in point.

The personal struggle of the protagonist is also a case in point.

As the first part of the film zooms into a personalized yet cosmic dilemma of migration as a move away from hardship, Hamilton engages us in a psychic trip where the protagonist constantly travels in his head between the burden of history and the promises of the future. This trip is most notably composed through intriguing archival relics, loaded confrontations between the protagonist and his mother, the nihilistically defeating performance of his brother and the intimate conversations with his pregnant wife.

The trip is further illustrated through the language of a highly poetic script written by Hamilton. Mostly a series of discontinued fragments rather than a classical dialogue or even monologue, the script’s power lies both in its spoken words and the silence that fills the space between them.

Like a growing repertoire of cultural production that champions the value of the personal in telling the story of the Palestinian cause, “Though I Know the River Is Dry” intimately delves into the “impossibility of living a moment free of responsibility to your cause,” as the director put it in his film statement.

The personal is perhaps quickly transcended into the broader struggle against occupation when the film ascends into the man addressing, quite straightforwardly, the occupier from the Qalandia crossing. An important face of how occupation is mainstreamed in everyday life, the Qalandia crossing is the frontier Israel has drawn between Ramallah and Jerusalem for Palestinians with mobility permits going back and forth throughout the day.

The protagonist speaks to how he hates the name Qalandia and from there moves on to exhibit the existentialist crisis that the occupation has cast over his life and others. “Qalandia. I hate the name. There is no other word. (Sound of perhaps an Israeli officer calling people crossing at the checkpoint): you made us go back to the beginning. To the naming of things (image of pregnant wife).” The crisis lies in the constructed reality that the occupation has imposed, and which, albeit resisted through the historicity of the struggle, is still mainstreamed through present everyday life.

In this existentialist moment, the protagonist questions the depths of the words “choices” and “freedom” as he fails to inhabit them in the course of his life. “You liberated us from choice. You liberated us from doubt,” he tells the occupier, in a twist of language. His words can sound as conventional language of condemnation born of a personal story used to tell a broader Palestinian story.

But these words also remain personal in how they do not repeat bigger political slogans but recognize the difficulty of commitment to the cause and its full meaning.

“Though I Know the River Is Dry” defies its own self, for even though it is a film about loss, its cinematic language at times defeats narrow conceptions about the occupation in a context where the political and the personal, the private and the public are inextricably connected.

And the very point of departure of an Egyptian English director making the film against a backlog of misconceptions in the Arab World, with cultural boycott entailing turning your back to the borders of historic Palestine, is an act of resistance. By traveling to Palestine and making this film, Hamilton actively challenges the anti-normalization stance as inherited from history books and grand political slogans. Instead, he contributes to a continuously renewed understanding of the cause of occupation through the realm of the personal.

"Though I Know the River Is Dry" will be screened on Tuesday, 26 March, at 8pm as part of the alternative arts festival Hal Badeel at the Townhouse Gallery's Factory Space, Hussein al-Ma’mar Pasha St., off Mahmoud Basiony St., downtown, Cairo. The screening is followed by Mashou3 al-Mareekh's open mic at 8:30, and a concert by Darwasha Band at 9:15.

Director: NSA bans film on Egyptian Jews

Al-Masry Al-Youm — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:35:00 +0000

The director of the film "The Jews of Egypt" film Amir Ramses has said that the National Security Agency banned the film in Egypt.

Ramses said that the NSA’s ban violated the powers of the country’s censorship authorities, and described the move as "ignorant and authoritarian."

"This is an encroachment on the powers of the censorship authority. The film had been displayed as it already gained the [censorship authority] approval without remarks. It was displayed in the [Panorama of the European Film] Festival, in addition to being displayed in more than one festival," Ramses wrote on his Facebook account.

Ramses also added that he and film producer Haitham Khamisy would take legal action against the Culture Ministry and the minister of culture for postponing the renewal of their licenses, and lashed out at the National Security Agency, which he said was “as authoritarian” as the Interior Ministry and the equivalen of the former State Security Investigation Services under ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

"Banning the film after gaining the regulatory approval twice is a barefaced encroachment by the National Security Agency," Ramses said.

'Enjoying poverty' in Congo

Jenifer Evans — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:01:00 +0000

“I’ve been watching this film for three days and I haven’t been the same,” said Moukhtar Kocache. “Walking in the streets of Cairo hasn’t been the same.”

The Contemporary Image Collective is currently running a series of talks and screenings called “Battles of Images” over four evenings. Curated by Palestinian artist Shuruq Harb, the series looks at news photography as one of the region’s biggest exports and examines “the visual culture resulting from shifts in photojournalism towards systems of aid.”

The first event was a screening of Dutch artist Renzo Martens’ “Enjoy Poverty” and a discussion between Kocache and Asunción Molinos Gordo. Kocache is an arts consultant and curator who was program officer at the Ford Foundation’s Cairo office from 2004 to 2012, and Molinos is an artist whose work considers the politics of global agriculture and involves incredibly precise duplications of visuals — for example, those of Egyptian fast-food restaurants for her recent “El Matam El Mish-Masry.”

Martens’ sort-of-documentary also involves a kind of duplication — not just of visuals in his case, but of the act of exploiting people in Congo. He plays a character, Renzo, who goes to Congo to determine whether poverty is its largest natural resource, and to encourage Congolese to take ownership of it. The film is angry, unflinching, obnoxious, and certainly not a comprehensive investigation into the subject.

Near the beginning of the film a World Bank representative retorts that poverty is not a natural resource, but “a shared defeat for the international community.”

But as the story develops, incidents and comments build up to show how Congo’s poverty is a massive industry whose beneficiaries are not necessarily Congo’s poor. We see the malnourished children of employees of foreign-owned plantations. An aid worker is challenged to consider why all the plastic sheeting in a refugee camp has UNICEF logos. It’s mentioned that 70 to 90 percent of some countries’ aid flows back to the donor country. An Italian AFP photographer is forced to explain somewhat ineptly why a photograph he takes belongs to him and not the people he photographs.

As well as presenting these powerful images and revealing comments, Martens self-consciously plays the white savior going down the dark river. Dressed in white, he periodically preens and sings for the camera while Congolese people carry his stuff. Kocache said afterwards that “his physique doesn’t help him — he has a sort of smart-ass look to him,” but it seems Martens positively utilizes this image — a cross between Marlon Brando and Klaus Kinski.

In this role of “enlightening” the locals he carries round a generator and a huge neon sign and erects it every now and then. It reads, “ENJOY POVERTY” in blue with a ridiculous small “PLEASE” flashing next to it in red. “For the audience, it needs to be English,” he explains.

Martens meets some Congolese photographers who take photos of celebrations for about US$1 profit per month. The AFP photographer, he reckons, gets US$1000 per month taking pictures of misery — or, “let’s be more specific,” he says: raped women, corpses, and malnourished children. “They’re only interested in negative stories, it’s supply and demand,” the photographer had said. “It’s a market out there.”

“The Americans know what they need,” agrees one of the men that Renzo is instructing. Renzo brings them to dying infants and dead people, encouraging them to see these subjects aesthetically, using light on jutting ribs to capture the most iconic, hard-hitting image.

The end of what Kocache called this “act of futility” — did the photographers end up worse off than they were before, he wondered — the group attempts to enter a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital to photograph patients. We see the doctor refusing to let them in, though he acknowledges that the international press corps are allowed because they are “here to make news not money.” Later, Renzo reads a letter asking the UN to revoke his press access, due to his “ill-placed” project that has “caused offence.”

Poverty attracts money, donors, charity, Renzo informs the people he meets. You’re not the only beneficiaries, but you have to be endlessly grateful. If you wait to be happy until your salary goes up you will be unhappy all your lives, because “we in Europe” don’t want cotton, palm oil, cocoa, and so on to be more expensive.

One of the powerful elements of the film was it showing the blazing anger of those people who are stuck in a situation in which they cannot feed their children to keep them alive. In the discussion afterwards, Molinos suggested that Martens is showing that people’s oversimplified ideas of poverty are wrong.

Molinos said it made her ask herself, as an image-maker, “Who are we producing images for?” and “What images are we hiding?” She pointed out that images of Egypt now seem to have one profile — gasmasks, teargas — and asked if is this a distraction from the other things going on in the political arena. She suggested we interrogate our motives, ask ourselves if we just want to be invited to biennales (which she called a “heaven of glamor”).

Harb also said, “It becomes most hard to talk about when we talk about it as art, the art market.”

Indeed, it would be easy to just critique the film’s flaws, or its form. But that would be to pretend that its basic message — that poverty is more profitable for aiders than the aided — is incorrect, or that if correct, it should stay in the realm of media studies. Perhaps it would be easier to dismiss it, more easy to just be offended by its form, if one saw it in a gallery in London, where you don’t really have to deal with poverty and representations of it every day?

Kocache pointed out that the film also comments on “the absurdity of the current art system, its priorities, the funding schemes for it.” He suggested that the art establishment now, unlike for example New York in the 1980s, is opposed to art and activism, is overly concerned with personality, would prefer an artwork to only have one function.

The film exasperated some audience members in different ways. One was angered by the portrayal of the doctor, who, he said, is risking his life. Someone else angrily pointed out that the idea that starting in Congo we go into the heart of darkness to find out about ourselves is extremely problematic — even though Martens seems to be confronting head on this tradition of Africa being used as a foil to Europe.

Another criticism put forward during the discussion, which varied in terms of contributions from trite (“It makes me sad”) to more nuanced and sophisticated, was that there is “no outside” of the artist’s vision (he is of course also hiding certain images), which is totalizing. He creates a moral landscape that is flat — like a package, as Harb put it.

For Kocache, however, the film helped him “stop pretending to be making a difference” and he said that the most important thing was that “it leaves the idea of personal responsibility hanging there.”

Kocache added that this is a time of confusion, when democratic social welfare states based on enlightenment ideas have failed all over the world, and as such is a potential moment for reformatting power dynamics. “It’s been years since I felt that so many people are willing to kick and scream,” he said — and not care that they won’t be invited to the biennales.

"Battles of Images" continues on Tuesday at 7pm with a session on the current status of documentary imagery produced about Egypt, and on Wednesday at 7pm with a lecture performance by Harb titled "In response to the Palestinian Authority." All events take place at the Contemporary Image Collective, 22 Abdel Khalek Tharwat St., downtown, Cairo.

Romanian movie 'Child's Pose' wins top award at Berlin Film Fest

Joseph Fahim — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:35:00 +0000

BERLIN — A Romanian movie about an upper-middle class family covering up for a hit-and-run carried out by its son has earned the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear Prize, marking the end of a largely unremarkable festival that left most critics underwhelmed.

A mini-soap opera focused on a dysfunctional mother-son relationship and touching upon the rise of the nouveau riche and government corruption in present-day Bucharest, Pozitia Copilului’s “Child’s Pose” won over the Wong Kar-Wai-led jury, snatching the honor from critics’ favorite, Sebastian Lelio’s “Gloria.”

Oscar-winning Bosnian director Danis Tanovic (“No Man’s Land”) received the Jury Grand Prix (Silver Bear) for “An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker,” a harrowing, low-budget, matter-of-fact recreation of the nightmare suffered by a real-life Roma couple when a hospital refused to treat the wife for owning no insurance. Playing himself with a heightened and startling degree of self-consciousness, Bosnian worker Nazif Mujic was given the best actor award for the same film.

Veteran Chilean TV actress Paulina Garcia scooped the best actress gong for her performance as an elderly single divorcee trying to find romance in the crowd-pleasing comic-drama “Gloria,” the best reviewed competition film. Garcia has beaten off strong competition from the likes of Juliette Binoche (“Camille Claudel, 1915”), Luminita Gheorghiu (“Child’s Pose”) and Catherine Deneuve (“Elle s’en va”).

American indie maverick David Gordon Green was the surprise winner of the best director award for “Prince Avalanche,” a studio-backed buddy comedy revolving around two workers coming in terms with growing up, failure and domestic life. The film stars Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch.

The best script award went to jailed Iranian filmmaker for “Closed Curtain,” one of the most divisive entries in this year’s edition. An experimental picture about art, confinement and the mysteriousness of creation, “Closed Curtain” was Panahi’s second film shot in secret after the 2011 documentary, “This is Not a Film.” The “Offside” director remains banned by the Iranian authorities from making films and leaving his country.

The Alfred Bauer Prize for a feature film that opens new perspectives went to another divisive entry, Canadian helmer Denis Cote’s “Vic+Flo ont vu un ours,” a quirky lesbian romance/revenge thriller starring Pierrette Robitaille and Romane Bohringer.

Two tepidly received films were given a special mention by the jury: Gus Van Sant’s issue picture, “Promised Land” starring Matt Damon, and Pia Marais’ South Africa-set drama, “Layla Fourie.”

Different faces of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Berlin

Joseph Fahim — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:50:00 +0000

BERLIN — In recent years, Israeli cinema has enjoyed a strong presence in major world festivals, winning awards right and left and exploring different perspectives of the Middle East conflict that is not always pro-the Jewish state.

At best, these films offer a self-reflective admission of guilt for both the bloodshed and the Israeli authority’s unjust treatment of its neighbor, interspersed with subtle subtext protecting Israelis from taking full blame. At worst, they can be poisonous right-wring affronts focusing on Israeli pain inflicted by a relentless, peace-hating enemy.

Two Israeli films screening at the Berlin International Film Festival this year epitomize this dichotomy. The first is Dan Setton’s documentary “State 194,” an earnest American/Israeli production heavily promoting a two-state solution. The film charts Palestinian National Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s quest to obtain full membership for Palestine at the UN. Setton follows Fayyad — a respected figure in both the West Bank and Gaza — as he roves the occupied territories to put into action his ambitious infrastructure plans. Interspersed throughout the main storyline are diverse episodes featuring Palestinian bloggers, Israeli activists, Jewish war veterans and American peace-brokers, all advocating the Palestinian cause and the possibility for an end to the 60-year-old strife.

Affable, modest and highly charismatic, Fayyad appears to be the influential leader divided Palestine needs to get behind, but the film presents an incomplete picture that is jarringly different from reality. The notorious corruption of the Palestinian Authority, the complicity of President Mahmoud Abbas in ongoing Palestinian suffering and the Islamization of Gaza Strip receives no mention in the film, nor does the rising Israeli popular support for expansion of settlements.

Setton has explicitly stated that his film is targeted at American, Israeli and European audiences, and it certainly shows. He deliberately avoids delving into any contentious territories, attempting to find a common ground between the two sides. For the misinformed Western or Israeli viewer, “State 194” could be eye-opening, clearing some dust off of a distorted narrative. For the average Arab viewer, though, “State 194” is no more than a well-intentioned documentary painting an overly bright picture of a murkier reality.

In terms of the present situation, Setton’s alliances are clearly with Palestinians. He underlines the discrimination Palestinians suffer from at the hands of both the current Netanyahu administration and the international community, emphasizing America’s unconditional backing of Israel and its role in rejecting Palestine’s UN bid. The ray of hope emerging with the beginning of US President Barack Obama’s rise to power, as Setton suggests, soon faded, soaked up by a decades-old system insusceptible to change. In one startling moment, he allows one interviewee to announce that Israel has become a pariah state.

Yet the director never approaches any pre-Oslo history, portraying the early years of Israel’s establishment with the kind of patriotism typical of even the most leftists of Israelis. Any Palestinian rights beyond 1967 are non-negotiable.

These are minor quibbles and Setton should be lauded for his effort nonetheless. Yariv Horowitz’s “Rock the Casbah,” on the other hand, is a vile piece of propaganda; a coming of age/action movie that takes pleasure in punishing the faceless, indistinguishable Palestinian enemy.

Set in the summer of 1989, the film is centered on a group of young Israeli soldiers deployed to Gaza. The innocent-looking, dewy-eyed newbies take an early hit when one of their comrades is killed by a Palestinian vigilante, who drops a washing machine on the unsuspecting soldier. Taking shelter at the house of a semi-reluctant Palestinian family, the company spends the summer getting some action, befriending sociable Palestinian kids and tracking down the vicious murderer of their late compatriot.

In Horowitz’s Palestine, rocks are more harmful than guns. The inexperienced armed soldiers constantly find themselves entrapped in cunning ambushes created by Palestinian hooligans. In Horowitz’s Palestine, a rock thrown in the face of the invader is more dangerous than the rifles in the hands of impulsive young soldiers defending a cause they never question.

The film strives for absurdity, aspiring to be the Israeli “Apocalypse Now.” Yet Horowitz is too green to successfully wrap up his odious dish under a shiny, appealing wrapping.

Horowitz’s debut feature does not contain a single positive Palestinian character. Nearly all Gaza residents are portrayed as merciless terrorists, cold-blooded savages inhabiting a land situated outside the realm of civilization. Even the mothers of the detained kids are represented as fat monsters without an ounce of rationality in their heads.

Following the dominant Israeli narrative, the damage and killing carried out by the Jewish army is done in self-defense; an act of retaliation against the violence instigated by the Palestinians. There is no glory in war, Horowitz implies, but there is a vindication for any type of aggression when all options have run their course.

Any Berliner who visited the “Breaking the Silence” exhibit by Israeli soldiers last year will testify to the falsity of “Rock the Casbah.” The deeply upsetting exhibition — part of a project organized by Israeli veterans — fully exposes the ugly face of the Israeli army, illustrating in devastating details the grueling practices Israeli soldiers employ to uphold their authority. Horowitz’s film, by comparison, feels like a fantasy concocted by a filmmaker reveling in the power of self-deception.

One cannot deny Horowitz’s technical talents, however. The “City of God”-like grittiness, the stirring action sequences and in-your-face machismo are quite eye-catching. His visual command, in hindsight, reveals the shortcomings of most Palestinian filmmakers.

The passion, sincerity and determination of young Palestinian directors are usually crushed under the weight of timid filmmaking, conceptual inadequacies and aesthetic indifference.

A good example is the Panorama Documentary section entry, “Art/Violence,” a passionate project directed by veteran Israeli director Udi Aloni with Palestinian youngsters Batoul Taleb and Mariam Abu Khaled.

A tribute to the much-loved Palestinian-Jewish actor, director and activist Juliano Mer-Khamis. who was assassinated in 2011 by a still-unknown killer, the film chronicles the history of the Jenin-based Freedom Theater from the point of his protégés, Taleb and Abu Khaled, along with his daughter, Milay.

The Freedom Theater was no mere tool of resistance — it was a vehicle for inciting social change, for challenging rigid traditions and patriarchal despotism (various political commentators believe that Hamas or Islamic Jihad were behind his assassination).

The oppression of women in its various manifestations is extensively discussed as the three youngsters prep for contemporary adaptations of “Waiting for Godot,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Antigone.”

It’s exceedingly difficult to assess a work directed by a two very young filmmakers with little experience in filmmaking and poor technical resources. As a labor of love and a medium of self-expression, “Art/Violence,” should be commended, embraced by both regional and international film fests and seen by a wide audience.

As a document of the Freedom Theater and its late charismatic founder, however, the film falls short. Lacking a defined rhythm and artistic purpose, the low-budget picture is very flat, adopting a one-note tone that grows increasingly tiresome midway through. Peppered with rare footage of Mer-Khamis and passages from poems, plays and essays, “Art/Violence” doesn’t capture the spirit of the theater, the raw energy that captivated viewers worldwide, and the untamed anger that riled the Islamists. No narrative binds the girls’ testimonies with the footage; in other words, no dramatic arc is used to tell these stories, which translates to an absolute absence of a narrative progression.

The passion of the girls does come across, but it lacks fire and zest. With proper guidance, the film could have been a unique study of art’s value in ongoing wars; a celebration of a great man who chose art as his weapon of choice in the struggle against ignorance, intolerance and totalitarianism. What we get instead is something more traditional and predictable; “Art/Violence” is undeniably heartfelt, if not quite an enjoyable or engaging viewing.

The Berlin Film Festival concludes on February 17.

Time travel and back: Three films capture revolutionary moments

Jenifer Evans — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 09:11:00 +0000

Azin Feizabadi is in Cairo, hosted by the art initiative Beirut. His presence is visible as you approach Beirut’s villa in the form of seven ghostly, punkish flags hanging on posts from its roof. They are white and have round holes cut out of their centers.

They are one of three activities the artist — based in Germany but born shortly after the 1979 Iranian revolution in Tehran — is showing while he is here. Another is a page in last week’s print edition of this newspaper, mirroring an article on the opposite page, but with text by Naira Antoun imagining Egypt 30 years after the 25 January revolution and a blank image. The third was an intense evening last week when Feizabadi screened three films by other people and gave a lecture performance titled “A Collective Memory: Poetics, Politics & Love Letters.”

The first two films were very different from each other but shared images of familiar violence. The World War II ruins presented as a post-nuclear war future in Chris Marker’s legendary “La Jetee” (1962), and its helpless prisoner being submitted to a weird torture, are similar to images circulating on a daily basis in Egypt now. The prisoner is injected with a time-travel substance that compels him to follow a visual childhood memory. The film is cold and romantic at the same time.

The second film, “Iran: A Revolution Betrayed” (1983), is largely comprised of footage shot by Ahsan Adib before and during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and has a great explanatory voice over. Its images are strangely similar to those seen in Cairo over the past two years: hope and liberation as people take to the streets, disbelief and disappointment as they fall in the face of regime gunfire, tanks in the streets, joy as the leader leaves office, more disappointment, more marching, economic disintegration, protesters fighting protesters, gunfire from a different regime. Meanwhile, the Iranian shah looks like the mad scientist in “La jetee.”

The film’s action also zooms back in time to August 1953 — with news footage declaring “The Shah Returns in Triumph!” — when a military coup backed by US and UK spy agencies overthrew an elected government to reinstall the shah, leading to an authoritarian regime complete with sinister secret police. It shows his 1967 coronation, then former US President Jimmy Carter giving him uneasy support in a televised toast in 1977 despite increasing human rights violations under his rule. Later, it shows the ousted shah being welcomed in Egypt, and the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis under Ayatollah Khomeini, including a moment when protesters battle each other in Washington, DC, in a visual repetition of the violence in Iran (and recently in Egypt). The film ends with a forced confession of a boy apparently raped by an older man. We are told that he is executed two hours later for homosexuality.

In Feizabadi’s lecture performance, between the second and third films, a sequence of statements, anecdotes, projected images, film clips and music draw out the concerns behind the films’ selection. The performance is a work Feizabadi has shown before, but is particularly apt for this moment in Egyptian history. “Personally and emotionally, it means a lot to me to put [these thoughts] on stage at this time,” he said.

The artist’s ongoing project, “A Collective Memory,” of which the three Beirut projects are a part, is a response to the June 2009 Green protests in Iran — what Feizabadi called a continuation of the 1979 revolution on its 30th anniversary. Reading out what sounded like personal letters, Feizabadi suggested that uprisings in the Philippines, Romania, Tunisia and Iran (and presumably others too) were somehow reiterations of the first film screening, held in Paris in 1895. He explained that watching the Lumiere brothers’ first film — 46 seconds of workers leaving the Lumiere factory — at the Grand Cafe in Paris, bourgeois witnesses watched the poor in action for the first time.

He said that protest is a gesture, a dramatic statement. The moment people take to the streets, making (private) individual yearnings public, is thus aesthetically choreographed. Despite, or because of this — it wasn’t clear — there is a tendency to lose sight of the individuals and focus on a narrative, which, in the case of the 1979 revolution, became the Islamic Republic’s. “We put desire of the unknown into myths,” Feizabadi said, as “truth never has been as beautiful as fiction.” He showed official images of the Iranian revolution on one side of the screen, while amateur snapshots, all people taking photos of themselves, appeared on the other.

This need to break the dominant image and be reminded of the diverse and unknown factors behind people’s separate decisions to protest was addressed by the final film showed. Abbas Kiarostami’s “First Case, Second Case” was also made just before and just after the 1979 revolution, but was banned after its 1982 premiere in Tehran and disappeared, only to mysteriously reappear on YouTube in 2009 (“projecting its urgency into 30 years,” said Feizabadi, evoking a kind of time travel).

In the film, figures from a cross section of Iranian society comment on a situation in which a teacher sends a group of children out of class for a week because he can’t figure out which one is being disruptive. If they name the culprit, they’ll be allowed back in. The commentators talk of resistance, of solidarity, and of the destruction of society by the creation of the secret police service under the shah. The majority feels that the students should stick by each other, and many condemn the teacher. A seemingly simple film with a seemingly innocuous topic, Feizabadi suggested that its banning and its resonance with the 2009 protesters were due to its reflection of the real circumstances behind the revolution, individualizing it and countering the official narrative.

The film relates to Antoun’s article, which imagines discussions about Egypt’s future education system in a surprisingly realistic way (apart from a few details, you might think it was now). Feizabadi said the newspaper intervention was an attempt to think about how Egypt’s revolution is going to be worked through, and to show that it needed protecting.

The flags (titled “Physical Principles of the Choice of Red, Green & Blue”) symbolize the moment when a people remove a symbol from their flag, that moment of opportunity when an authoritarian regime is overthrown. They are also somehow meant to suggest in-between time, “when past and present change their meaning.” The missing circles are being concurrently exhibited as part of a show at Germany’s Galerie im Kornerpark featuring Feizabadi and artist Farkhondeh Shahroudi, who is his mother. The flags are visible above Beirut in Cairo until 25 February.

The lecture performance ended with an excerpt from “Symphony No. 11, ‘The Year 1905’” by Dmitri Shostakovich, dedicated to the suppressed 1905 Russian revolution but written after the failed uprising in Budapest in 1956. Talking about it, Shostakovich, who was born shortly after the 1905 uprising, mentioned a recurrent cycle: suffering under authoritarian regimes, periodically protesting, being betrayed. Denying the people might temporarily work, but eventually incites more cycles of violence.

We do not have to be depressed by this recurrence, though, Feizabadi’s films and lecture seemed to suggest, because the recurrence itself and the poetic approach manifest in his threefold activities, and in “La jetee,” put forward the idea that there isn’t just a before the event, an event, and an after the event, but that time is more mysterious and flexible.

This piece was originally published in Egypt Independent's weekly print edition.

Berlin Film Festival offers an exciting selection from across the globe

Joseph Fahim — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:17:00 +0000

BERLIN — The 63rd Berlin International Film Festival boasts a promising line-up packed with art-house blockbusters, debut features and copious retrospectives. But as in recent editions of the festival, the main selection could be hit or miss. The Berlinale competition lacks big names on caliber of Haneke, the Dardenne Brothers or von Trier — all devoted Cannes alumni — and many of the big names hosted by the festival have gravitated toward the French Riviera or Venice in recent years (it would not be surprising to see former Golden Bear winner Asghar Farhadi’s next movie premiering at Cannes’ official competition in May).

Although low on art-house star power, the Berlinale remains an exceptional platform for new discoveries and experimental works, as well as a unique vehicle for lesser-known European luminaries exploiting the breadth and space of the festival to gain a more prominent spot in the limelight.

Headlining the competition is Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s “Pardé,” a surprising entry given the fact that the former Berlinale Jury Grand Prix winner remains under house arrest. Similar to his last documentary, “This is not a Film,” “Pardé” is shot in Panahi’s house, exploring the fine line between reality and fiction in a story involving a man, a dog and a young woman. Secretly smuggled outside Tehran, “Pardé” is already tipped as a front-runner for the Golden Bear prize race.

After a long stretch of misfires, two-time Palm d’Or nominee Bille August (“Pelle the Conqueror,” “The Best Intentions”) hopes to reverse his fortune with romantic thriller “Night Train to Lisbon,” an adaptation of Pascal Mercier’s best-selling novel of the same name, starring Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling and Mélanie Laurent.

Also hoping to make a comeback is Oscar-winning Bosnian director Danis Tanovic (“No Man’s Land”) with “An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker,” a contemporary tale a Roma family’s daily hardships.

Two-time Cannes Grand Prix winner Bruno Dumont (“Humanité,” “Flanders”) makes his Berlinale debut with “Camille Claudel, 1915,” a biopic of the celebrated French sculptor starring Juliette Binoche.

Returning to the Berlinale for the first time since 2008 is prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo (“Woman on the Beach,” “The Day He Arrives”) with “Nobody's Daughter Haewon,” another inquisition into masculinity, love and film.

Having premiered the first two parts in Cannes and Venice respectively, Austrian enfant terrible Ulrich Seidl (“Import/Export,” “Dog Days”) concludes his “Paradise” trilogy with “Paradise: Hope,” an oddball story of an overweight teenage girl falling for her doctor in a diet camp.

French actor/director Emmanuelle Bercot (“Polisse,” “Backstage”) teams with Catherine Deneuve in her fourth directorial effort, “On my Way,” a road movie about a woman on a quest for self-discovery.

Having raised eyebrows with her contentious study of prostitution and feminism in last year’s “Elles,” Polish director Malgoska Szumowska turns her attention to Catholic clergy in “In the Name of,” a fictional account of a young priest fighting to repress his homosexuality.

Religious hypocrisy is also the subject of French filmmaker Guillaume Nicloux’s “The Nun,” an adaptation of Denis Diderot’s 18th-century novel (famously adapted to screen by Jacques Rivette in 1966) about a young girl forced into nunnery by her parents. The film stars Isabelle Huppert and Martina Gedeck.

American cinema figures are in heavily in this year’s edition. Six films are participating in this year’s competition, in addition to a sizeable host of acclaimed independent productions culled from the recently concluded Sundance Film Festival. Topping the selection is Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight,” the highly anticipated sequel to the generation-defining romance, “Before Sunrise,” starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Steven Soderbergh presents his penultimate film, “Side Effects,” a psychological drama starring Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Channing Tatum.

Indie maverick David Gordon Green (“George Washington,” “All the Real Girls”) directs another buddy comedy in “Prince Avalanche,” a remake of the 2011 Icelandic hit “Either Way” starring Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch. Gus Van Sant reteams with his “Good Will Hunting” star Matt Damon in “Promised Land,” a drama about the dangers of gas fracking co-starring John Krasinski and Frances McDormand.

Other notable American films including Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut, “Don Jon's Addiction,” co-starring Scarlett Johansson and Julianne Moore; “Primer” director Shane Carruth’s long-awaited sophomore effort “Upstream Color” and Noah Baumbach’s New York love letter “Frances Ha” starring Greta Gerwig.

A host of Arab co-productions and Arab-themed films are screening outside the festival’s competition this year.

Egypt is represented with three entries: Hala Lotfy’s Abu Dhabi Film Fest-winning debut feature “Coming Forth by Day” screening at the Forum section; Malak Helmy’s experimental short “Records from the Excited State — Chapter 3” and Paul Geday and Attiyat El Abnoudi’s 1975 “El Cafeteria,” both showing in the Forum Expanded sidebar. The latter film is screening as part of “Cairo: The City and its Cinema in Transformation,” a panel discussion moderated by Forum Expanded curator Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and featuring Egyptian filmmakers Tamer El-Said, Hala Lotfy, Hala Galal and Paul Geday.

Palestine has three films under its name: “Art/Violence,” a documentary centering on Juliano Mer-Khamis’s Jenin-based Freedom Theatre directed by Udi Aloni, Batoul Taleb and Mariam Abu Khaled; Annemarie Jacir’s “When I Saw You,” a paean to the armed resistance of the 60s seen from the perspective of an autistic child; and Marcus Vetter’s documentary “Cinema Jenin - The Story of a Dream,” a non-fiction feature documenting the German director’s initiative to reopen a deserted film theater in the West Bank.

Three other Palestine-related films are screening in the Panorama section: Dan Setton’s American/Israeli production “State 194,” a documentary charting the efforts of Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority Salam Fayyad to have Palestine join the UN, and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s French/Canadian “Inch'Allah,” a drama about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as observed by a Canadian doctor.

Finally, Lebanon participates in the Panorama Documentary section with Mahdi Fleifel’s Lebanese/British/Danish co-production “A World Not Ours,” a family diary revolving around three generations of Palestinian refugees in South Lebanon.

The Berlin Film Festival concludes on February 17.