Back from the third round of MEIFF, Hani Mustafa follows a string of concern with the past in several of the Arab films screened there Regional film events provide a rare opportunity to assess a large number of films from a particular part of the world at a particular point in time, and where possible register a single characteristic running through a large number of them. At the Middle East International Film Festival, which closed last Saturday, one idea informing the Arab films on the programme was concern with time: its passage, and the effect of its unfolding on people (or characters). Several films concerned themselves with history, whether to review a particular episode from the past or to engage with the beauty of times past. Such over-the-board interest in time might drive the critic to a rushed judgement to the effect that Arab cinema is digging up old glories or indulging in nostalgia for its own sake. Yet a fair number of the films on the MEIFF programme effectively eschewed such shallow nostalgia, opting for a serious probing of the past to make contact with their roots or to present an informed and profound view of the present. One such film, which dealt with history deeply and with technical prowess, was by the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, who managed to skilfully interweave the personal and the political -- a formula he employed in his previous films, whether features or shorts. Suleiman's cultural specificity -- his status as an Arab Israeli -- gives his films a contradictory flavour, a kind of dialectic present in all his works starting with his first short The Gulf War... What Next? Screened at the Ismailia Documentary and Short Film Festival in 1993, it presented a clear view of one Arab Israeli in exile, and his contradictory feelings on hearing (false) news that Saddam would be targeting Tel Aviv with Scud missiles. On the one hand, as a dispossessed Arab, he is excited; on the other, he is deeply concerned for his mother, who lives in Nazareth (a few kilometres away from Tel Aviv). The Palestinian cause is routinely depicted in a clichéd and direct way by the vast majority of Palestinian directors and thereby makes for weak films. Yet as Suleiman demonstrated in Divine Intervention (which received the Grand Jury Award in Cannes 2002), it is possible to deal with the Palestinian cause in a human and artistic way -- an approach he also took in , which featured in the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival this year and received the Best Middle East Film Award at MEIFF. Yet participation in prestigious festivals, and even prizes, is less important in a film than that film's structural innovation or ability to present new cinematic values. Suleiman presents an extremely sensitive political issue with powerful irony and the narrative skill of Charlie Chaplin. is especially characterised by lack of dialogue, so much so that the last quarter of the film is completely devoid of dialogue. The film opens with Suleiman himself arriving in Israel from abroad. On his way to his city, Nazareth, rain and lightning force the taxi driver to stop so that he ends up alone with the director in the car, surrounded by bad weather. And as if Suleiman is asking himself how he ended up in this situation, in a flashback he moves back in time to 1948, when the Arab armies were first defeated and Palestine occupied. Suleiman employs an episodic technique, telling his tale through a series of sketches. In one such episode, an armed man walks briskly with a serious expression before a group of young men at a café with their weapons on the table. They ask where he is going, and the armed man answers mechanically, hand on gun, that he is on his way to liberate Tiberias. Nonchalantly they tell him it has already been liberated, and surprised he asks about another Palestinian village, and they point in the opposite direction. He moves briskly with the same seriousness, and seconds later they ask him where he is going, he tells them, and they say it too has been liberated. A very powerful example of Suleiman's sarcasm, this scene: the director continues to tell the story in this temporal framework without there being any development on the dramatic front. The rhythm of the film remains slow and plodding year after year. First, Suleiman documents the signing of his city's surrender to the Israeli army, then the escape of many of its people to Jordan. As for the director's own father, who is part of the resistance and manufactures weaponry, stops doing so after he is tortured. The film depicts the state of depression into which the father then falls, with his life reduced to sitting idly in the house or fishing with a friend. Dramatic succession is not essential to . The importance of the film derives from the poetic state of mind it induces through repetition and subtle cross referencing. Suleiman however seems to have lost much of the humour with which Divine Intervention was infused -- which made the film seem, to many of those who have followed his work, a purely black comedy full of a sense of defeat. *** The element of time is equally important in Heliopolis by the young filmmaker Ahmed Abdallah, named after the Cairo neighbourhood (also known as Masr Al-Gedida) -- even though time in this film is almost constantly at a standstill due to the static state in which the film's ordinary heroes find themselves as they face -- or rather fail to face -- their tedious lives. They have desires and ambitions, but there are no major dramatic shifts in their lives. The screenplay progresses along a number of intersecting rather than interwoven lines: a distinctive style not so alien to Egyptian cinema. Many Egyptian films in recent times have employed this technique -- Cabaret (2008) and Al-Farah (The Wedding, 2009), for example, both written by screenwriter Ahmed Abdallah, to be distinguished from the present director. The film, which takes place in the course of a single day, opens with the young academic Ibrahim (Khaled Abul-Naga), who appears to be extremely exhausted on the morning of a new day as he rushes to his meeting with an elderly woman (Aida Abdel-Aziz) whom he is to interview as one of a few members of Jewish families left in Egypt. She lives in an old flat in one of Heliopolis's distinctive buildings. This line of drama is unclear and raises a number of questions: What is the object of Ibrahim's research? Is he exploring minorities in Egypt (as he tells the lady) or the architecture of Heliopolis (as he tells the officer who stops him while he shoots video in Korba)? Or is it that he simply feels emotional about Heliopolis? The film does not answer this question before it ends, but simply tells of Ibrahim's tragedy when the girl he loves leaves him to marry another. The film does not seek to explain Ibrahim's emotional state even though it ends with an emotionally charged answering-machine message in his beloved's voice (the voice over is by Hind Sabri) in which she apologises for leaving him. Another line in the film concerns a young woman (Hanan Mutawi') who works at the Heliopolis Hotel while telling her family that she works in Paris. In the third, a young couple are trying to find a flat in which to live. The man they phone with a view to buying his flat, Dr Hani (Hani Adel), makes up yet another dramatic line: his entire family have immigrated to Canada and while he waits to obtain the visa and harbours an implicit love for his neighbour (Yossra El-Lozi). In addition to these juxtapositions, there is another altogether different drama that feels as though it is a separate, short film included in the script. It concerns a police guard whose service is in the vicinity of a church who practises his usual rituals listening to old songs, eating bread and cheese, smoking. His intense loneliness is broken only by friendship with a small street dog whom he feeds and plays with. Remarkable in this film is the director's attempt to provide drama that intentionally eschews development and concentrates on stillness. Time alone moves forward, with the film ending as the day ends. Yet structurally such films require much effort and effective story telling. It also requires that the film should have aesthetic values other than dramatic development as such: stand-alone situations or powerful characterisation, for example, with their expression and dialogue revealing their detail. Sadly Heliopolis has no such values. More accurately, it does -- but only incompletely. It may indeed be that the film was cut too harshly in the editing for the narrative to remain whole. There is a huge difference between what might be missing on purpose -- to let the viewer complete in her own head -- and what is missing due to faulty craftsmanship. I feel that the director, who is also the screenwriter, attempted a new experiment in film. He has said that since the beginning he sought to write a script with very little or no dialogue, drafting the dialogue together with the actors before filming. As a result the film seems like the result of team work, emerging from the actors themselves. Technically, some of the footage Ibrahim collects of the streets of Heliopolis resembles documentary film -- not a fault in itself. Yet this documentary drive seems to have involved the director a little more than necessary, and he was so involved in it that he seems to have succumbed to the pleasure of chronicling to the point of neglecting narrative. *** The problematic relation between time and place is central to filmmaking in general and it becomes perhaps more intense in documentaries -- as evidenced by the many possible responses to the documentary Giran (Neighbours) by Tahani Rashed. At one level, the problematic relation between place and time can be seen as a historical, political conflict played out in the Cairo neighbourhood of Garden City between the state of affairs prior to and after the July Revolution. At the outset of the film the nationalist-inclined viewer might feel that Rashed is critiquing Nasser and the Revolution -- since Garden City was aesthetically destroyed under Nasser. Likewise the interviews with the son of the Wafd Party official Fouad Serageddin -- a symbol of pre-July politics -- as well as with Mursi Saad El-Din and other members of the aristocracy: all suggest that Rashed is critiquing the Revolution. By the end of the film, however, the position on the Revolution has changed as the novelist-dentist Alaa El-Aswani and the late Marxist philosopher Mahmoud Amin El-Alim express support for it. By the time the film ended Arab critics felt they had seen a film not only about Garden City or politics but also a film about Egyptian society as a whole. Some even felt the film had adequately registered the humanity of Arab societies and how horribly time has managed to crush that humanity on several grounds. The director employs a range of instruments, moving through a series of smooth and enjoyable scenes. The viewer encounters cats sleeping on top of cars in the shaded avenues of Garden City, long shots of children playing football there, and every aspect of life in that neighbourhood in a holistic and effective mould. It presents the complex class formation that makes up the neighbourhood, including the remains of expatriates who made up the long- gone cosmopolitanism of Cairo. It also touches on the presence in Garden City of, first, the British Embassy (which was the political pivot of the Middle East until the middle of the 20th century) and, later, the American Embassy (which has performed the same function since) -- and the intense state of security associated with it, a troubled connection with the political Other inducing much fear and concern with the future. While Abdallah offers in Heliopolis a static state, Rashed presents an extremely fast-paced dynamism in depicting the deterioration of the quality of life in Cairo's prestigious neighbourhoods. Yet in both cases nostalgia was a driving force, with the one slow and exhausted, the other brisk and strong. *** Time is of course an essential element in cinematic structure, but few films manage to approach history without being drawn into the sanctimoniousness and rhetorical flourish with which history is usually presented. This is something Ahmed Maher manages to achieve in Al-Musafir (The Traveller), which opened MEIFF and in which the director uses history as a completely empty grid on which to travel back in a purely philosophical way to the genesis of the main character: the anti- or rather a-hero, Hassan (Khaled El-Nabawi, Omar Sharif), the earliest manifestation of which genesis takes place on an autumn day in 1948. It is a year that has its own significance, which the director nonetheless brushes aside. He is merely searching for the formative elements of generations that result from the union of Hassan, an Egyptian young man, and Nora, an Armenian young woman. Yet Maher takes this idea to the extreme, not only avoiding historical references but also sticking with the implied and the uncertain where his characters' fate is concerned. Opening in 1948, the script does not even mention the Nakba but attempts rather to document the development of a particular family in Egyptian history, following the same method in the autumn of 1973 and again in the autumn of 2001. But in so doing it does not rest content with avoiding any reference to the events in question -- the October War, 9/11 -- but also places the viewer in a state of uncertainty regarding what happens to the characters themselves. This seems to be yet another, uniquely cinematic use of time. The Arab story, it seems, is still driven by history -- but judging by the variety and power of the films on offer in MEIFF, Arab directors are finally approaching history in new and interesting ways, using it to tell their stories of all that is human rather than letting it control and tell its stories through them.
