Disappointment has dogged Egyptian film lovers for the last few years, with the industry failing to produce anything but one kind of commercial film and producers not only refraining from variety but also funnelling most of their capital into television. The kind of film that has dominated the industry since the 25 January Revolution is an essentially commercial feature with the low-class hero living in a shantytown, in which the drama is interspersed with violence and the kind of electro-urban-folk song that has proved increasingly popular, the mahragan, on the pretext of a popular wedding. This was particularly clear in the last two Eid seasons. Due to the production crisis that has persisted with subsequent waves of the revolution, the production mechanisms that had resulted in occasional good films have stopped entirely. All that remains besides the aforementioned commercial film are low-budget, independent productions that rely in part on grants from film institutions. Of the latter ilk are two films that were screened in the Abu Dhabi Film Festival last month: Ahmed Abdallah's Rags and Tatters in the official competition; and Ayten Amin's Villa 69, which received the special jury prize in the New Horizons competition. *** No doubt most of the films that dealt with the 25 January Revolution have proved disappointing to viewers and critics alike. Long before the revolution could take form whether in reality or in an artist's mind, many filmmakers — perhaps possessed by an excess of enthusiasm — sought to contribute to the revolution; and a number of extremely naive and vapid films ensued: Sameh Abdel-Aziz's Sarkhet Namla (An Ant's Scream), Tarek Abdel-Moeti's Hazz Said and Ashraf Fayek's Tick-tick Boom. Ibrahim Al-Battout's Winter of Discontent and Youssri Nasrallah's After the Battle are relatively possible to engage with — the latter participated in Cannes's official competition in 2012 — but both have essential problems in relation to the topic. And perhaps the essential fault of all these films is that, while they recount an otherwise unrelated narrative, they try forcibly to explain the revolution. In Rags and Tatters — currently being screened for one week only — Abdallah doesn't attempt to answer his questions about the revolution. Rather he presents a narrative that emerges organically from the Friday of Anger, the second major event of the revolution on 28 January 2011, but moves as far away as possible from the revolution as such in its development. Abdallah does not deal with the event from the political viewpoint. Rather, he presents a distinctive experience of events in the character of a jailed young man (Asser Yassin) who escapes when the prison is stormed, along with several others, on 29 January, following the disappearance of the police by the end of 28 January. Abdallah tries to present his story without dialogue, what is more, his trick being to develop the drama and communicate the information visually, requiring the viewer to follow the story and sympathise with the hero without words. This hugely challenging device often works but sometimes doesn't, yet Abdallah's insistence on experimentation is definitely to his credit. “I try to move 180 degrees away from the previous film each time I make a new one,” Abdallah says. “This is what I did with Microphone [2010], which is totally different from my first film, Heliopolis [2009]. And now Rags and Tatters, which is totally different again from Microphone. With very few exceptions — Youssef Chahine and Youssri Nasrallah, who are capable of playing a different game in each film — directors will make the same film over and over. Those who don't are often subject to attack, too, because in Egypt we do not accept change with ease.” In its first few scenes the film documents the state of chaos that accompanied the escape of prisoners the night of the Friday of Anger: the storming of police stations and prisons and the escape of prisoners, both of which included many casualties. Abdallah uses suspense and tension to present these scenes, with the escape of two young men, one of whom (Mohamed Mamdouh) is injured. The latter has a mobile phone on which he has recorded a video of what happened, and this is how Abdallah answers the question of how they escaped. But this video does not play a major part in subsequent episodes of the film. Abdallah's focus is on the places to which the fugitive goes and what they constitute for that fugitive, who is lost to his own world. At the start he goes to his family home, where his mother and sister live, and here the lack of dialogue doesn't work as well as it might. The silence in the emotion and intimacy when his mother first sees him, for example, seems forced. But the director says these scenes were shot at the start of the project and due to budget limitations they could not be redone to omit dialogue in a more convincing way. And it is in this context that Abdallah explains how the experiment of the film was conceived: “At the start I wanted to present a film that contained a lot of contemplation, and at the start of the filming I said, ‘Let's reduce the dialogue or omit it completely.' But we found the neighbours in some of the places where we filmed volunteering to tell us about their conditions, so I felt we had to let these people participate with the real-life stories. And these are the only stories that we hear in the film.” The film therefore contains sequences that seem documentary, when the hero leaves his parents' house to live in the cemetery, fleeing the Military Police, which was trying to fill the security void in the country following the collapse of the police on 28 January. He then moves to the rubbish collectors' village in search of his fellow escapee's relations, now that he has lost him. The film then documents the lives of the villagers. And because this mixing of documentary sequences into a fiction film is unusual, some viewers at the Abu Dhabi Festival had major problems with it. “These sequences were interwoven into the fabric of the film with ease,” Abdallah says. “Why shouldn't a little boy from the rubbish collectors' village tell his simple story while our hero is there, especially considering that the screenplay is not concerned with the chronology of the story. As an editor my view is that a mistake occurs when the flow of information is interrupted to add a documentary sequence. This is not the case. In reality the life of the hero whether in the cemetery or in the village does not include much drama, and I wanted to place the viewer in a contemplative state.” While the hero is moving to the rubbish collectors' village the sectarian attacks erupt — something with which the Abu Dhabi viewers took issue on the basis of historical accuracy, since no sectarian events took place at all during the 18 days that followed 25 January. This however is clearly Abdallah's attempt to compress a much longer series of events into the time frame of the film, something for which in the Christian-majority rubbish collectors' village he might be granted poetic licence. “The Manshiyet Nasser events depicted took place four months after the revolution,” he explains, “but I imagine that in fiction cinema it is legitimate to create overlaps of events with the object of connecting the dramatic values of the film. This is no Al-Jazeera documentary, after all, and it is well to remember that such sectarian attacks take place periodically and some of them were never even mentioned in the media.” One particularly moving aspect of the film, at which Abdallah excels, is the sound track, in which the sound effects of the Egyptian street register to a great extent, including the sound of the rats in the rubbish collectors' village. But it is the element of music that makes the most distinctive impact, with two great Upper Egyptian folk voices — Mohamed Al-Agouz and Ahmed Barrain, whose joint work Farsh wa Ghata (the “mat and cover” that the hero is looking for) seems to have inspired the Arabic title — making their mark at the start. In the cemetery we hear Sufi chanting, which counterbalances the sombreness of graves and completes the picture, while at the rubbish collectors' village Coptic hymns accompany the picture there. It is something Abdallah has done expertly since Microphone, to use music that emanates naturally from the filming location to substantiate a given scene or sequence. *** How might a filmmaker tell a story about isolation and death without depressing the viewer, indeed making ample room for laughter and cheerfulness in the process? Only very few films can do that, and Ayten Amin's fictional debut Villa 69 is one such film. “At the beginning I was thinking about making a film about someone in his 50s suffering the last stages of a terminal illness and living in a villa, the artistic challenge being to make the film in a single setting. I contacted Mohamed Al-Hagg, and I had seen a short film of his called Atef, which I liked for dealing in a light-hearted style with a heavy human topic. I talked to him about co-writing a long human-interest film in the same vein. I made initial drafts of the screenplay with him, but the final draft was co-written by Al-Hagg and Mahmoud Ezzat and I supervised the writing.” The film opens with a man named Hussein (Khaled Abul-Naga), living alone in a villa where he is accompanied only by a servant named Abdel-Hamid. Many details draw out the character: he is suffering some form of illness, since a nurse comes to give him injections periodically; he is a completely antisocial personality who has practically locked himself up in Villa 69, whose sign replaces the title of the film on screen. From the first scene, the fixed camera watching the fluttering of the window curtain while Hussein sits in the garden evokes the hero's isolation. We later find out that Abdel-Hamid has left the house, going back to his village outside Cairo for some personal reason. Hussein is a complex character whose privacy he protects excessively. With the exception of the nurse, with whom he discusses her family and fiancé, Hussein keeps to himself; it becomes clear that this nurse, who calls him by his name without using any titles, is very close to Hussein — something, as it eventually becomes clear, that Hussein insists on with everyone. The film, as Amin intended it, is made up of a character and a setting. Everything in it depends on how the character of Hussein is built in the screenplay and what the villa he lives in is made up of: his complete, stand-alone world. The filmmaker explains how she built the character with her screenwriter saying, “We started with an illustration of the character of Hussein and a precise description of the house in which he lives: how he lives in the ground floor of the villa, leaving the upper floor unoccupied; how he now sleeps in a room other than his original room in childhood and adolescence. Afterwards we developed the other characters, omitting some and adding others. For example the character of Aya, the girlfriend of the young man Seif, was not in the first draft. Some details that I used in the film come from my own personal observations. My family had a villa in Alexandria where my grandmother lived on the ground floor leaving her original room on the upper floor unoccupied. The truth is that this tendency recurs with many villa residents. After a certain age, it becomes exhausting to climb up and down the stairs and the person moves downstairs. Yet at the start of writing we decided to draw in detail the upper floor that Hussein doesn't use...” The real action begins when Hussein's isolation is interrupted by the arrival of his sister Nadra (Lebleba) and her grandson Seif (Omar Ghandour) to live with Hussein for a while since Nadra is refurbishing her apartment and has nowhere but the family house to live in the meantime. It is this that, by undoing Hussein's airtight isolation, allows us into his private world. In his isolation Hussein seems to be structurally part of the upper class of Egypt, many of whom used to occupy luxurious apartments in Zamalek or Downtown, or else villas in the suburbs: Maadi, or Heliopolis. It is as if the director is paying homage to this all but extinct class of people, which is dying like its representative, Hussein, and whose dying is accompanied by the architectural genocide against the older villas in the urban area and around it. “Perhaps unconsciously I wanted to tackle a life whose details have grown all but nonexistent in Egyptian society,” Amin confides. “My initial goal was to tell about people like my relations, with their problems and the conflicts they engage in for the most frivolous reasons. So, for example, the detail that emerges in passing in the dialogue between Hussein and Nadra about her wanting to tear down the villa and sell the land — a project Hussein managed to prevent — was not at all important to the drama, and I didn't intend it as social critique in any way.” The value of the film resides in the attention paid to every detail, starting from the setting and the accessories that bring the characters to life, as well as the brilliant performance of the actors, be they professional or not. Lebleba for example each year presents a different film and excels at her various roles. Abul-Naga too is no doubt a talented actor, but in this role he seems to challenge himself to astounding effect, making a major departure from previous roles. As Amin puts it, “he plays a 50-year-old whose health is very fragile.” Yet the character is at the same time stark and funny. The young professional actress Arwa Gouda, who plays Sanaa, Hussein's photographer friend, gives a distinctive performance despite its limited screen time. Yet what is surprising about the acting is the brilliance of the young actors who are standing before the camera for the first time, and whose abilities compare favourably to the professionals: the grandson, his girlfriend and the nurse. Though this kind of film is similar to independent films from the standpoint of production, relying as they do on grants (including the Ministry of Culture grant and the Abu Dhabi Festival's Sanad grant), the filmmaker insists she cannot classify the film as independent: “The producers, Wael Omar [who produced most of the film] and Mohamed Hefzi [who took over later] did everything they could to make a film free of the time pressures well-known in independent filmmaking. It was filmed over six weeks like any normal film.” And it does recall the viewing pleasure of the golden age of Egyptian cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, with directors like Henri Barakat and Fattin Abdel-Wahab, which were never lacking for powerful drama and delightful comedy. Amin says she wanted to dedicate this film to Abdel-Wahab but in the end decided to make the dedication more private: “I dedicated the film to my father. There is no doubt that Fattin Abdel-Wahab's cinema is light-hearted and pleasurable, and it had a huge influence on my life. It was out of love for his work that I named the hero Hussein after the hero of his film Ishaat Hobb [Love Rumour], and I also invoked the spirit of one of the scenes of Merati Mudir Aam [My Wife is a General Manager] in the scene where Hussein's partners visit him — in the way they drink their coffee. This, I felt, was my homage to that pleasurable cinema.”
