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Tribeca 09 screened two Arab features as part of its out of competition slate: Annemarie Jacir‘s Salt Of This Sea and Franco-Algerian director Lyès Salem’s Masquerades.

Salem is the newest member of a vibrant, talented new generation of Algerian filmmakers (all of whom are under 45) that includes Tariq Teguia (Inland/Gabbla), Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche (Adhen/Dernier Maquis), and Malek Bensmaïl (La Chine Est Encore Loin).

Masquerades is a completely engaging satire. It won numerous first place awards last year on the Arab Film Fest circuit – Best First Film in Carthage, Best Arabic Film in Cairo, and the Muhr Arabic Feature Best Film in still purse-rich Dubai (despite the weakening of the Gulf emirate’s real estate market), where the French-Algerian production also won that particular event’s first ever FIPRESCI prize.

Previously, Salem had also scooped up awards for his two other films, both shorts: the 2001 Golden Star in Marrakesh, for Jean Farès, and the 2005 César, for Cousines.

Set in Aurès, a Berber village in the mountains of East Algeria, Masquerades is one sly dog of a movie.

Initially, it is apparently nothing but a delicious – and harmless – wedding farce. Salem at first seems intent on nothing more than puncturing Algerian machismo posturing, and the cultural values of a society that overvalues all things European.

The film revolves around the deeply insecure figure of Mounir (Salem), a puffed up gardener, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Ali G, is perpetually dressed in tracksuit, and prefers to refer to his lowly occupation as that of a “horticulture engineer”.

Mounir works for the richest man in town (an unseen Colonel), is married, and has a beautiful narcoleptic sister Rym (Sarah Reguieg), who suffers from a tendency to pass out, suddenly, in the most inappropriate circumstances. Because of her condition, Mounir endures much cruel mocking by the villagers regarding Rym’s potential suitability as a wife.

Their incessant persiflage finally drives him over the edge. One night, he cannot take it any more, gets drunk, and grandly announces to the village her impending nuptials to a wealthy Frenchman, a certain William Van Cooten, whom he has seen briefly on TV. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, Rym is madly in love with Khliffen (Mohamed Bouchaïb), a neighbour, and Mounir’s best friend.

As word spreads around town concerning this impending phantom marriage, Mounir suddenly becomes an honoured man in the village. People who once shunned or made fun of his station in life begin to shower him with gifts. Rym goes along with Mounir’s slip of tongue in order to force Khliffen to propose, and the rest of the film revolves around Mounir’s attempts to resolve his dilemma with honour.

Masquerades is in part a hilarious variant on the long-standing French vaudeville tradition of quiproquo (Salem’s original screenplay was titled Les Trois Mensonges, or, The Three Lies), or the misunderstood word. Appreciating its deft sense of humour is only enhanced by knowing both Arabic and French, as there are some truly funny cross-language puns here; although by no means is this necessary to enjoying the film. It has affinities with Egyptian comedies of the Sixties, and recalls most directly veteran Algerian auteur Merzak Allouache’s groundbreaking Omar Gatlato (1976).

But there is more to Masquerades than breezy social satire. What Salem has succeeded in doing is create a metaphor for Algeria – a country that many young people want to abandon in search for work and a better life in Europe, a country that is controlled by an aging oligarchy, a country that was racked in the Nineties by a long-running civil war that resulted in the death of 160,000 people, a country where broadcast media is strictly controlled, a place where cinemas are few and censorship rampant, a country where movie directors have faced death threats by radical Islamists.

If Algeria has fallen asleep from time to time, since its independence in 1962 from France, when will it wake up for good?

Salem’s movie gently hints at one possible answer to that question.

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Al-Ahram Weekly
7 – 13 January 2010
Issue No. 980

Nine jury members, each choosing nine films, brought the total of short films shown by the Goethe Institute’s recent film festival to 81. The Independent Cinema Festival which ran from 10 to 12 December in Cairo showed films from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Palestine and the Gulf.

The jury members chose films that epitomised the reality of contemporary independent films and were produced independently from the familiar scene of production and distribution. The producers of the 81 films were independent groups, workshops or individuals.

The Goethe Institute intends to launch a website for short Arab films to allow film aficionados better access to contemporary independent cinema instead of having to cram themselves into a small viewing room to watch non-commercial films. Aside from the films, the site will also contain a data base as well as research and commentary.

Egypt’s Ibrahim El-Battout is one of the most celebrated directors of independent film in the Arab world. His two feature films, Ithaki and Ain Shams, have brought him recognition at home and abroad. Some would say that El-Battout has single-handedly elevated independent cinema from an under-appreciated pursuit to a rival of mainstream film. Digital camera in hand, the cameraman-turned-filmmaker has encroached on the realm of commercial film, doing on low budget what others only hope to approximate with big money.

His Ain Shams has won many awards, including the Golden Tauro at the Taormina Film Festival, best film in Rotterdam Arab film festival, and best film at the San Francisco Arab Film Festival.

Curiously enough, El-Battout sees himself less of a champion of independent film than a man who is trying to express his views and feelings in film. He came to cinema from the world of war. After graduating from the American University in Cairo in 1985, he worked as war correspondent for US and Japanese companies. His reportage on the Iraq-Iran war, the Gulf war, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Somalia and Bosnia was a christening in fire for the would-be filmmaker.

Despite the accolades, El-Battout remains matter of fact when he discusses his films. The reason for their success, he says, is the power of the human message and the strong convictions of all those who cooperated with him in making the films.

Writer and director Mohamed Mamdouh took part in the festival with his film Al-Ati (The Coming ). Mamdouh is a keen researcher of independent cinema, and his book Media Democracy: The Rise of Independent Cinema in Egypt is among the best on the topic.

Mamdouh agrees with many artists and practitioners of independent cinema that the definition of this particular form of art is rather loose. It is generally agreed that independent cinema is about non-conformity to the commercial, big budget, and familiar practices of mainstream film. But this may not be enough to define the new genre, and Mamdouh believes that it is too early to grasp the full potential of independent cinema.

“A new cinematographic genre has exploded on the scene. The number of independent films is huge. This number doesn’t express anything at present but the democracy of the medium. The means of filming and producing have become available to a wider public thanks to the progress in the techniques of digital cameras and mobile phone cameras.”

One of the films that raised many brows during the festival was Central (Telephone Exchange) by director Mohamed Hammad. It concerns a telephone exchange operator who spies on phone calls and thus leans a thing or two about social hypocrisy. The language the film uses has been described as crude, an accusation that Hammad rebuffs by saying that cinematic language must reflect life, and the language he used in the film does just that.

Hammad, who cringes when called a realistic director, is working on a film entitled Ahmar Bahet (Pale Red). This is a romantic film and quite different from Central. “A filmmaker must always experiment,” he tells me.

Hammad considers Sherif Arafa to be his role model. He marvels at the range of films Arafa has made over the years: realistic, musical, comic, fantastical, action, and autobiographical ones.

The man responsible for selecting the Egyptian films shown at the festival was filmmaker Emad Mabrouk. When I asked him if this was a difficult task, he said it was not hard at all. “Egypt produces nearly 100 independent films every year, so you have an ample room to choose,” he said. “It would have been a harder task in other countries, such as the Gulf, where you only get five or so new films a year.”

The independent cinema in Cairo is rich and varied, Mabrouk said. “You get a lot of experimentation and some that range between the conventional and the modern. And you get quite a few short films.” In his selection of films for the festival, Mabrouk tried to chose at least one representative film from the genres he identified. However, he had to rule out the Film Institute’s graduation project because he found the results too limited by the academic restraints with which they were made.

Mabrouk also limited his choice to films not exceeding 20 minutes to give the festival goers a better chance to appreciate the variety and terseness of style. The choices he made were all of films produced before 2007, since international festivals prefer to screen films not posted on the Internet.

The criteria followed by Mabrouk were not uniform among the jury members, who were each given free rein in choosing the entries from their respective areas of specialty. The festival entries were therefore of great variety in their focus and mood.

The festival can be seen as evidence of the long way independent film has come in the Arab world over the past two decades or so. Independent cinema may have taken its first steps in 1990 with help from such cultural organisations as Pro Helvetia (Switzerland), Qasr Al-Cinema (Egypt), and the Goethe Institute (Germany). Since then, other private companies supporting independent film have come onto the scene. These include Semat, Al-Warsha, and the Jesuit School.

The first steps were timid, as can be seen in films such as Habbet Sokkar (A Little Sugar) by Hatem Farid and Raff Al-Hamam (Pigeons Flutter) by Ayman Khuri. As time went by, the confidence of the filmmakers grew, and they were helped by the improvement in technology. So recently, we saw a few independent films getting critic as well as public applause. These being Ain Shams by Ibrahim El-Battout, Heliopolis by Ahmed Abdallah, and Basra by Ahmed Rashwan.

Independent cinema has come of age, and many of its productions have been dubbed on 35mm and shown in film theatre across the Arab world. Some of the independent cinema directors, such as Amr Salama and Mahmoud Kamel, have gone on to work for commercial cinema.

The rise of independent cinema in our part of the world is quite different from what happened in other parts of the world. In America, independent cinema grew in the 1960s as a way of protest against Hollywood’s big studios. In our region, the growth of independent cinema was mostly a reaction to the advances in digital cameras, which opened the door for a new generation of artists to experiment with different types of film. Now that the number of independent films is on the rise, there is no going back.

Goethe Institute film website: www.arabshorts.net.