Arab cinema: Hope and glory
Despite crises, Arabian cinema shows diversity, says Saibal Chatterjee.
Arab cinema covers a wide geographical expanse but, faced with a variety of social, cultural and political crises, its output has declined steadily over the years. Yet, the innate talent and creativity that filmmakers from the Arab world, especially from countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, possess is second to none.
The Arabesque sidebar of the ongoing 7th Osian’s-Cinefan Film Festival (OCFF), with ten entries from countries as diverse as Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Bahrain and Lebanon, provides live evidence of the vitality and range that Arab cinema is capable of achieving. This is despite the fact that there is space in the market only for commercially oriented, especially Egyptian, films, making it well nigh impossible for serious Arab cinematic works to emerge on a regular basis.
What is heartening is that nobody is in the mood to give up the fight. Says Egyptian writer-director Hala Khalil, whose film The Best Times is in the Arabesque line-up: “You must remember that we live in a conservative society where it is extremely difficult to deal with ideas and situations that are not culturally acceptable. If I want to speak freely about my environs and myself it is not easy. That tends to limit the scope of experimentation in our cinema. But that doesn’t stop us from soldiering on.”
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| A still from the movie, The Visitor |
For Michel Khleifi, Belgium-based Palestinian filmmaker whose
Route 181: Fragments of a Journey
in Palestine-Israel is one of the most eagerly awaited entries of the 7th OCFF, the crisis of Arab cinema stems primarily from the paucity of funds for personal, socially relevant films.
“We exist outside the commercial cinema circuit and life out there isn’t easy at all,” says Khleifi. “What makes it infinitely worse is that I belong to a land under occupation. The challenge before filmmakers like me is to develop a language that can help us share our experience with the world. We have no country, no institutions, no support systems.”
The case of Bahrain’s Bassam Al Thawadi, whose feature, The Visitor, is regarded as only the second full-length fiction film made in his country, is intriguing, if not as tragic as that of Khleifi’s. Al Thawadi, incidentally, also crafted the first, The Barrier, 14 years ago.
Says the Bahraini filmmaker: “The Arab world has no dearth of talent. What is missing is a proper infrastructure for filmmakers. Producers can think only of money and they impose preconditions on the process of creation. I had to include an element of mystery in The Visitor simply because the producer wanted me to.”
The only way forward for Bahraini filmmakers, says Al Thawadi, is through co-productions. “We are a small country with a population of only 600,000. Even if every single Bahraini were to see a locally produced film, the producer wouldn’t recover his investment. We have to make films that can be distributed all across the Gulf region,” he says.
Cinema, Al Thawadi explains, is extremely important for the people of Bahrain. “When I was growing up in the 1970s, I would regularly see Indian films like Haathi Mere Saathi, Hare Rama Hare Krishna and Yaadon Ki Baraat in local theatres. The hall would always be packed and tickets often had to be bought in the black market,” he reminisces.
Egyptian film scholar Farida Marei, a member of the Fipresci jury at the 7th OCFF, blames governmental apathy and stringent censorship for the slow growth, if not outright decline, of Arab cinema. “Cinema is an expensive medium. The government does not think that filmmaking is among its priorities. The censorship laws are also extremely restrictive,” she says.
But despite all the problems that they are faced with, Egyptian filmmakers have managed to make their presence felt not only in the Arab market but also on the international festival circuit, Marei says.
“Egyptian films travel well across the Arab world because the language is simple Arabic and the plots, more often than not, are entertaining,” explains Marei, “but it is far more difficult for films from Tunisia or Morocco to find takers because of their peculiar cultural inflections.”