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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.

By Amira Hass

Thirty-five days after returning from Barcelona on a Sun D’Or flight, items belonging to documentary film director Sahera Dirbas, which Israeli security people had removed from her luggage and sent separately, were returned to her. Among them was a bronze figurine she had won at the International Euro-Arab Amal Film Festival in Spain for best documentary – awarded for her film “Stranger in My Home.”

The figurine was found and returned on Tuesday, six days after Haaretz requested a response from Sun D’Or regarding its whereabouts. Haaretz was informed that the prize had been found before the company alerted Dirbas.

The award-winning film directed by Dirbas, who was born in Haifa and lives in Jerusalem, has been screened at Israeli cinematheques and abroad. It was among eight films shown at the annual festival, which was held at the end of October. “Stranger in My Home” tells the story of five Jerusalemites, refugees from the 1948 war, who lost their homes in West Jerusalem, and a refugee from 1967 who was evacuated from his home in the Old City’s Mughrabi neighborhood.
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On November 5, Dirbas made her way home from Spain via Barcelona. After answering questions from Israeli security employees regarding her work and the film festivals in which she had taken part, she was asked to enter a separate room for continued questioning, where a female security guard demanded she remove all her clothing. All of her belongings were taken out of her suitcase, and she was told that four items would be taken for additional examination and sent separately: two chargers for hard disks she had with her, a hair straightener and the bronze figurine. The examination took more than two hours.

When she arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport, she could not find the box with the separate items and filed the standard form for lost luggage. Four weeks later, on December 3, after her telephone inquiries went unanswered, Dirbas’ lawyer Reem Alhatib, submitted an official complaint to El Al (to which the security company was said to be connected) and a demand for compensation. In the letter of complaint, Alhatib linked the loss of the prize to a “discriminatory attitude and misuse of the security check to abuse, humiliate and hurt an Arab passenger.”

The two hard-disk chargers have yet to be returned to Dirbas.

Sun D’Or spokesman Ron Rahav released the following statement: “The security check was carried out by security personnel in Barcelona as it is carried out for all Israeli airlines, according to regular procedure as directed by the relevant state bodies. During the security check, items were indeed taken from Ms. Dirbas: two chargers, a hair straightener and a bronze figurine she won at a film festival. We apologize for the delay in returning the items to the passenger. The company made great efforts to locate them and indeed, after a careful search, the items were found in Israel and sent to the passenger by messenger. We regret the harsh feelings engendered as a result of the delay in locating the items, but at the same time, Sun D’Or is committed to the highest standard of security. We are in contact with the passenger and we will see to it that she is compensated.”

Dirbas told Haaretz that she had been offered a free ticket to Europe.

Beverly Hills, CA (November 18, 2009) — The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that 15 films in the Documentary Feature category will advance in the voting process for the 82nd Academy Awards®. Eighty-nine pictures had originally qualified in the category.

The 15 films are listed below in alphabetical order by title, with their production company:

* “The Beaches of Agnes,” Agnès Varda, director (Cine-Tamaris)
* “Burma VJ,” Anders Østergaard, director (Magic Hour Films)
* “The Cove,” Louie Psihoyos, director (Oceanic Preservation Society)
* “Every Little Step,” James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo, directors (Endgame Entertainment)
* “Facing Ali,” Pete McCormack, director (Network Films Inc.)
* “Food, Inc.,” Robert Kenner, director (Robert Kenner Films)
* “Garbage Dreams,” Mai Iskander, director (Iskander Films, Inc.)
* “Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders,” Mark N. Hopkins, director (Red Floor Pictures LLC)
* “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, directors (Kovno Communications)
* “Mugabe and the White African,” Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey, directors (Arturi Films Limited)
* “Sergio,” Greg Barker, director (Passion Pictures and Silverbridge Productions)
* “Soundtrack for a Revolution,” Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, directors (Freedom Song Productions)
* “Under Our Skin,” Andy Abrahams Wilson, director (Open Eye Pictures)
* “Valentino The Last Emperor,” Matt Tyrnauer, director (Acolyte Films)
* “Which Way Home,” Rebecca Cammisa, director (Mr. Mudd)

The Documentary Branch Screening Committee viewed all the eligible documentaries for the preliminary round of voting. Documentary Branch members will now select the five nominees from among the 15 titles on the shortlist.

The 82nd Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Tuesday, February 2, 2010, at 5:30 a.m. PT in the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2009 will be presented on Sunday, March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center®, and televised live by the ABC Television Network. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 200 countries worldwide.

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Fri Sep 4, 7:43 AM

By Cameron French
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TORONTO (Reuters) – The Toronto International Film Festival is under attack for its decision to present a series of films spotlighting the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, which a group of high-profile artists and celebrities say constitutes complicity in “the Israeli propaganda machine”.

At issue is the festival’s new City to City program, which will present 10 films focused on Tel Aviv.

The 34th edition of the festival will begin next Thursday.

Canadian filmmaker John Greyson last week pulled his documentary “Covered” from the festival in protest, and a statement published online on Thursday and signed by more than 50 artists, academics, and filmmakers likened the program to a celebration of apartheid-era South Africa.

“This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the (Tel Aviv) area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries,” say the signatories, which include actors Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, author Naomi Klein, and filmmaker Ken Loach.

They accuse the festival of taking direction from the “Brand Israel” campaign, which seeks to improve the country’s image and has focused on Toronto as a test city.

“We do not protest the individual Israeli filmmakers included in City to City, nor do we in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF,” they say.

“However… we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign.”

With a diverse multicultural population, including sizable Jewish and Arab groups, Toronto frequently sees public demonstrations of support for both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Earlier this year, the Ontario division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees passed a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions, while “Israeli Apartheid Week”, founded in Toronto in 2005, is held annually on several Canadian university campuses.

In a blog posting last week, City to City festival programer Cameron Bailey said he was attracted to Tel Aviv because “the films being made there explore and critique the city from many different perspectives”.

He also said the series was conceived independently and was not the object of pressure from any outside source.

Festival director Piers Handling said on Thursday the films speak for themselves and are meant to promote discussion.

“If there are issues that have been raised by these films, that’s exactly what the festival should be about, to show work that’s challenging, work that raises questions, work that’s contemporary, work that deals with today’s issues,” he told Reuters.

Officials at the Israeli consulate in Toronto did not immediately return requests for comment.

The festival will showcase more than 300 films from 64 countries when it begins its 10-day run on September 10.

(Reporting by Cameron French; editing by Peter Galloway)

By Mohamed Elshinnawi
09 September 2009

Tony Shalhoub, star of the hit USA Network series, Tony Shalhoub, star of USA Network’s “Monk,” signs autographs for fans Tony Shalhoub got hooked on acting when he was six years old, and his elder sister volunteered him to play an extra in her high school production of The King and I. His father, who had emigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon as an orphaned young boy, hoped that Tony and his nine siblings would stay in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and work in the family’s grocery business.

From Green Bay to Broadway

But Tony ended up at the prestigious Yale School of Drama, and recalls his acceptance there as a turning point in his professional life. “When I left Yale and graduated and I worked at a theatre, the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was another kind of turning point,” Shalhoub says. “Now as a working actor, getting paid.”

Shalhoub made his Broadway debut in 1985, in The Odd Couple and was nominated for a 1992 Tony award for his role in Conversations with My Father. But it was his portrayal of Italian cabdriver Antonio Scarpacci in the popular TV sitcom Wings that introduced him to the nation.

“Wings was certainly a great thing that gave me exposure to a larger audience,” he admits, but points out, “I had already done some films at that time and I was continuing to do films during the years of Wings, and I was continuing to go back to New York and to do Broadway plays.”

Although Shalhoub had worked in films and theater, the TV series “Wings” made him a recognized star

Shalhoub is best known today as the obsessive compulsive detective Adrian Monk. The popular TV series, called Monk, is starting its seventh season on the USA Network, and Shalhoub has won several Emmy Awards for his portrayal of the title character.

A versatile actor

On the big screen, he’s played a variety of roles: a lawyer in The Man Who Wasn’t There, a Cuban-American businessman in Primary Colors, a sleazy alien shop owner in the Men in Black films, a former TV star in Galaxy Quest, and an Italian-speaking chef in Big Night.

In the 1998 thriller, The Siege, he finally appeared as an Arab-American: an FBI agent named Frank Haddad. In the film, a terrorist attack on New York City by Islamic militants prompts the U.S. government to declare martial law and round up all young men of Arab descent and put them into internment camps, just as the government did with Japanese Americans following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

“When we did this movie, some people dismissed it as preposterous,” he recalls. He stresses that The Siege was not just a movie about terrorism or explosions. “It was also trying to make the point about what kind of reaction we would have to a horrible incident, in other words, how do we respond as a country.” Shalhoub says the message of the film was “we have to be careful that our country and the Constitution does not begin to unravel in our response.”

Rejecting racial and ethnic stereotypes

Throughout his movie career, spanning over 20 years, Tony Shalhoub has turned down scripts when he felt there were negative or racist overtones in the story line… whether it was toward Native Americans, Jews, or Arabs and Muslims. “I have always tried to avoid those kinds of things and if there was a role that seemed to have those kinds of elements in it, I try to put a different spin on it.”

Out of that conviction, Shalhoub, along with the Network of Arab-American Professionals, established The Arab-American Filmmaker Award Competition in 2005. The goal of the contest is to allow young Arab-Americans to write their own screenplays, trying to change the prevalent negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims presented on film.

Helping Arab-Americans tell their own stories

Shalhoub feels strongly that Arab Americans must produce movies that tell the real story of their heritage and showcase the human face of Arab-American families and their values… dramatically showing that they are not so different from their fellow citizens.

In “AmericanEast,” Shalhoub plays the main character’s Jewish friend
“I have always wanted to help and give support there, because these are stories that need to be told,” he says. “We are kind of like ‘the unheard-from minority,’ especially after 9/11. There was a large effort on the part of these people to get their work out there before 9/11, and since 9/11, it is a whole ‘nother chapter.”

Shalhoub appeared in the post-9/11 drama AmericanEast, about an Arab-American family living in Los Angeles. The film was produced by Arab and Muslim American companies, with Shalhoub serving as executive producer. He plans to continue his support for Arab-Americans in the film industry, making sure that their stories are be

By Mike Collett-White
September 10, 2009

VENICE (Reuters) – For Omar Sharif, the future and the past are useless. The only thing that counts for the Egyptian actor is the present.

“I think that thinking about the future is something for young people, and thinking about the past is useless when you are old,” Sharif told reporters in Venice, where his latest movie “The Traveler” is in competition at the film festival. “In life I have already wiped out everything that has already gone,” he said through an interpreter, switching languages with each question. The translator gave his age as 78, although online biographies and his Myspace page say he is 77.

“Every moment is like that for me now and that is how it should be. To live well at my age you always have to think about concentrating your attention on the moment that is now and the moment you are living because you don’t know how much longer you may live.”

Sharif plays the old Hassan in Ahmed Maher’s debut feature film The Traveler (El Mosafer), which follows Hassan on three pivotal days in his life — the first in 1948, the second in 1973 and the third in 2001.

The story explores time and the past, as an elderly Hassan seeks to reconnect with his own personal history through the young Ali who he is convinced is his grandson.

THE ONLY ARAB

Despite becoming a major Hollywood star, appearing in classics like “Lawrence of Arabia” in 1962 and “Doctor Zhivago” three years later, Sharif recalled how his early days in the U.S. movie business were not easy.

Being the “only Arab” working in Hollywood, “I had to be very careful what I did.

“For example, Columbia Pictures signed a five-year contract with me when I had made Lawrence of Arabia but they didn’t pay me anything,” he said.

“When I made Doctor Zhivago they sold me to MGM for $15,000. I made the film for $15,000. My American lawyer said ‘I can sue them’, and I said no, leave it, I don’t want them to think of me as someone who only wants money.

AFP
Mon Sep 14, 3:14 pm ET

TORONTO (AFP) – Egyptian filmmakers led by pioneer Yousry Nasrallah are winning over international audiences for the first time at the Toronto film festival this year, organizers said.

“Egypt has always had a strong domestic industry,” festival co-director Cameron Bailey told AFP. “But (its filmmakers) had a hard time breaking out internationally.

“A new generation of young filmmakers is now making films that work both inside Egypt and beyond,” he said.

This year several films from Egypt are showing at the festival in a new trend.

“Normally we have one film at the festival from Egypt at most,” Bailey said, pointing to first-time feature directors Ahmad Abdall’s “Heliopolis” and Ahmed Maher’s “The Traveller” as examples.

Canadian director Ruba Nadda meanwhile has set “Cairo Time,” starring Alexander Siddig in the Egyptian capital.

“Egypt is having a really strong year, asking tough questions of their society, really digging deep about what’s going on there and telling good stories,” Bailey said.

He also highlighted the work of Cairo-born pioneering filmmaker Yousry Nasrallah, whose latest film “Scheherazade, Tell me a Story” about the lives of three women constrained by social norms, is also showing here.

Nasrallah “is the senior member of this current crop and his films have done well at film festivals (worldwide),” he said.

“Others who have followed in his footsteps are making films with high artistic ambitions, yet are accessible, more along the lines of European art films.”

As a result, “there’s more than the usual melodrama of Egyptian commercial cinema to see this year.”

Saleh Bakri, the 30 year-old actor who won the Ofir Prize (Israeli Oscar) for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Khaled, the jazz and skirt enthusiast, in The Band’s Visit, has been chosen sexiest man of the year by Motek (”Sweety”), an Israeli woman’s magazine that targets 20-something urban college graduates.

The Motek announcement came about one month after Time Out Tel Aviv published a lengthy interview with the actor (page 38), who recently played Hamlet (in Hebrew) at Tel Aviv’s Tmuna Theater. You can see Bakri in this clip from The Band’s Visit, courtesy of YouTube, where you can also watch the trailer.

Here’s the Motek cover, with the words “Ya Habibi!” (or, as far too many Israelis pronounce it, “Ya Khabeebee”) plastered across his chest.

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