Arab cinema left out of the picture
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Last Updated: May 16. 2009 1:25AM UAE / May 15. 2009 9:25PM GMT <!–

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Jury members at this year’s Cannes Film Festival do not have an enviable task, having to judge a strong competition stacked with some of the most prominent names working in film today. But cinephiles around the world do have reason to rejoice as they are facing the prospect of future theatrical releases for new films by the likes of Ang Lee, Pedro Almodóvar, Quentin Tarantino, Alain Resnais, Lars Von Trier, Jane Campion, Ken Loach, Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noé.

Judging from the official line-up for the 62nd edition at Cannes, which opened on Wednesday and runs until May 25, this is going to be a good year for film in general and for auteur cinema in particular, for it is the directors who reign over the French Riviera this week.

The festival is the oldest and most prestigious event of its kind in the world. It is also, arguably, the most international. Founded as Le Festival International de Cannes, it dropped the worldwide qualifier in 1947, although that year saw the screening of films from 16 different countries.

These days, Cannes is a credible barometer for registering the fluctuations of world cinema. However vexing the term has become, one can use Cannes to gauge the rise and fall of various regional and national cinemas. So, in addition to fielding a list of established and uncompromising directors, this year’s festival also includes a notably strong selection of films from Southeast Asia – China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines.

Almost entirely absent from the glitz and glamour, however, are films from the Arab world.

True, Elia Suleiman, the Palestinian director, is competing at Cannes for the first time in seven years. In 2002, his last feature, Divine Intervention, snagged both the Jury Prize and the Fipresci prize, awarded by the international federation of film critics. This year, his latest film, The Time That Remains – about four episodes in the life of Palestinian family who remained on their land from the creation of Israel in 1948 until the present day – is in the running for the Palm d’Or.

But before anyone considers Suleiman’s presence a triumph for Arab cinema, or even a mark of representation for the Arab world, consider the director’s comments in an interview published six years ago in Beirut: “I do not feel a particular affiliation with Arab cinema,” he said. “It has not influenced my approach to filmmaking, and this is not said in jest with provocation. Rather I have been influenced by Asian cinema, particularly cinema from Japan and Taiwan. I absorbed it like a sponge, ironically because it felt so Arab.”

The past five years have seen a smattering of Arab and Middle Eastern films at Cannes, most of them out of competition and relegated to the Directors’ Fortnight or the section entitled Un Certain Regard.

Last year, there was the Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir with Salt of This Seaand the Lebanese directing duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The year before, there was Nadine Labaki’s successful but insipid Caramel and Danielle Arbid’s less successful but far more challenging Un Homme Perdu.

But while Bollywood is booming and achieving international crossover appeal, and Southeast Asian cinema is nearly outstripping European art-house and American independent film in terms of critical acclaim and narrative innovation, Arab cinema remains in a serious state of stagnation.

Little has changed in the decade since John Malkovich, however obnoxiously, presided over the jury at the Cairo film festival and declared two-thirds of the largely Egyptian and Syrian films selected so terribly boring that he splayed himself out and slept on the screening room floor.

It would be too easy to conclude that the Cannes film festival is blind to Arab cinema or politically disposed to ignore it. And it would be wrong. Cinema in the Arab world is plagued with its own problems.

The first is censorship, which is exercised on every level of film production, from the writing of scripts to the screening in theatres. There is nothing more infuriating than going to a movie theatre in Beirut, for example, to find that the first 15 minutes of The Insider, where Al Pacino’s character pays a visit to a political leader who may or may not resemble a figure in the Hizbollah hierarchy, have been cut.

There is nothing more discouraging to future generations of producers and directors than seeing a Lebanese filmmaker such as the late Randa Chahal Sabbag fighting with a censorship board that wanted to cut 40 minutes from her feature Civilisées, which ended up being screened exactly once in Beirut; or seeing Danielle Arbid skip the local market entirely for Un Homme Perdu; or seeing Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige financing the local theatrical release of Je Veux Voir themselves when no Lebanese distributor was willing to pick up the bill; or hearing Ziad Doueiri complain that he has, to date, never received a penny from the official DVD sales of his feature film West Beyrouth, one of the highest grossing Arab films in years. And Beirut is one of the more tolerant cities in the region, a place with enough business savvy to make the film industry pay.

More glaring even than censorship is the fact that Arab cinema suffers from institutional and educational neglect. Only Egypt boasts a credible film industry, but it has been in steep decline since its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. Only Morocco has made itself an appealing destination for location shoots and foreign productions. But while Maghrebi cinema is generally more advanced than elsewhere in the region, it still does not have real international presence – intriguingly, one of the best places to catch new Moroccan films is the Fespaco, the biannual pan-African film festival in Burkina Faso.

In many cases, national film bodies – where they exist – have become decrepit bureaucracies. No country has followed the French model of taxing cinema tickets and using the revenues to fund local productions. Rasha Salti, the film festival programmer and curator, once wrote of Syrian cinema: “Film production is almost entirely controlled by the state, resources are scarce, and the output is as humble as one or two films per year. Efforts at international and regional distribution for exhibition and dissemination at best are dismal and mostly non-existent, the local network of theatres … is gravely dysfunctional.”

Virtually all of the Arab films aired at Cannes have been co-produced by France, or Belgium, or the Netherlands, or Britain. None is made with local money; European co-productions often try to assuage some colonial guilt.

The Middle Eastern film industry would benefit by a more philanthropic approach by local investors. Ghassan Salhab, the Lebanese filmmaker, an auteur who should be up there with Suleiman, once described the education of would-be filmmakers in the region as catastrophic. The film scholar Lina Khatib likewise points out the dramatically poor quality of scriptwriting as a severe limitation on the potential of
Arab cinema.

All the film festivals in the world – the new ones in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha; the old ones in Cairo, Damascus and Marrakesh – will do nothing to improve Arab cinema unless serious attention is paid to conditions in which filmmakers work.

Festivals, after all, do not address education standards, intellectual property rights, fair wages and labour rights guaranteed for film crews, sources of funding, or the freedom to realise the stories, images and sounds that occupy a filmmaker’s imagination.

This year’s Circle Conference at the Middle East International Film Festival is Abu Dhabi in October will at least attempt to correct that deficit by discussing the financing of filmmaking.

Festivals may book plane tickets and hotel rooms and restaurants. They may even brand cities and help them weather the credit crisis. But in terms of enduring cultural product, all of this is beside the point. Cannes’s reputation is built on years of great film, and unfortunately, few of the building blocks are coming from this part of the world.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is an arts writer for The National