For nearly a decade now documentary cinema has been steadily occupying a space where it can positively compete with fictional film, whether at festivals or theatres. And it is thanks to many world-known filmmakers that the traditional distinctions between the two genres of movie-making have been eroded. In documentaries, auteur interventions would result in a form of fiction making, while in many fiction films — especially low-budget productions — local non-professional actors would be used to produce something akin to documentary. This was the case with Apple by Samira Makhmalbaf, which won the Locarno Festival jury prize in 1998; likewise Danis Tanovic's An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, which won the jury prize at the Berlinale this year. Both films operate in the twilight zone separating documentary from fiction. But purely documentary films like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2004, have proved equally important. The presence of documentary films was especially evident at the seventh Abu Dhabi Film Festival this year. This year at the Abu Dhabi Film, the Venice Golden Lion winner, Gianfranco Rossi's Holy GRA (Grande Raccordo Anulare, or the Great Ring Road — the subject of the film — being a pun on the Holy Grail) was screened in the documentary film competition. It is a beautifully shot film, something especially apparent in night shots of the road, in which the photography benefits from the bokeh effect. The human substance of the film concerns a number of marginalised characters working in and around that strip of asphalt surrounding Rome. These include the ambulance driver, two older women who seem like former prostitutes and several girl dancers who work at an extremely poor bar off the road. The film also deals with a rich man living in an old palace, parts of which he sometimes rents out for parties. The director presents the lives of these people with a spontaneity and a lightness bordering on comedy. His interventions are clear, as in the scenes of the apartment building with the tiny living spaces in which microphones were clearly placed in the apartments to record the conversations and fixed cameras at the windows to follow the action, with a girl living with her elderly father and their Latin American neighbour. Thus the film flits from one unrelated life to another, covering vast territories connected only by the ring road. From the man who works as an eel fisher telling his relations about the dramatic drop in the number of eels in the Tiber due to urban encroachment to the ambulance driver at day's end with his mother, who has Alzheimer's, there are moving and informative stories. But arguably the most captivating is the one with which the film begins and ends, involving an entomologist studying the effect of the red palm weevil on the palm trees lining the road. In the attendant description of the insect's behaviour — sending out its scouts to a given palm, and on being assured of its adequacy invading in great numbers where they have a sort of orgy in the palm, laying eggs, before they establish their life there... until the palm is completely dead and they move onto another — there is an oblique reference to the effect of human behaviour on the environment. Traffic is about more than getting from A to B, as the New York-based Egyptian director Sherif Al-Katsha attempts to show in Cairo Drive — which received the award for best film from the Arab world in Abu Dhabi's documentary competition. At first sight the viewer imagines they will be given an account of the transportation tragedy experienced by Cairo's 20 million inhabitants on a daily basis, but the film depicts what is even deeper. Through the characters, the film registers many of the wayward customs of Cairo traffic: how any inch of space is instantly occupied, how cars manoeuvre their way around each other, the language of the horn and indicator lights and the potentially fatal rule-breaking behaviour of drivers. In the framework of conversations with drivers during their everyday trips, the viewer is introduced to their problems — and through these, in turn, the director documents Barack Obama's visit to Egypt in 2008. Letting the characters respond to the visit on their own terms, he recounts how, to solve the traffic problem and ensure the American president's security while he went from the Sultan Hassan Mosque to Cairo University to the Pyramids, the government took the safest route and made it a public holiday. The characters include a taxi driver, a microbus driver, an ambulance driver, two women (one old, one young) learning to drive, and a father driving his son to school. With each character Al-Katsha presents something of a human story: the ambulance driver's desire to marry and have a family, for example, and his coworkers' advice. The film is also an occasion for surveying the extent of corruption, with the girl learning to drive obtaining her official licence through relations in the police without taking the test and the woman having to bribe the relevant authorities to obtain hers. Al-Katsha says he was going to end the film at this when the January Revolution took place and he altered the ending somewhat, depicting the complete dysfunction of traffic during the revolution when all of the police force stopped operating, to be replaced by “popular committees” of local residents setting up their own checkpoints. Al-Katsha even deals with drivers' problems with these committees. It also follows the political thread, giving voice to the political views of the characters until the 2012 presidential elections. But he never lets politics encroach too much on the central theme of the film. The revolution will be at the back of your mind when you see a film on the Iranian Revolution of 1979, especially since there are many points of comparison between the two events. The Iranian Revolution too started with liberal-leftist protests against the regime of Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi but having toppled said regime was immediately overtaken by the better organised (Shia) Islamists. Such, at least, is the story told by filmmaker Nihad Persson Sarvestani in her film My Stolen Revolution, which received honourable mention from the documentary competition jury. It is a documentary of the personal kind in which the director tells her own story as a young woman of 17 and already a member of a leftist organisation together with her brother Rostam. Along with many other friends the two siblings are agitating for protest activities during the revolution — only to be arrested to a man (and woman) by the Islamist authorities in the early 1980s. The women activists managed to escape, the men were all executed. The film is a long journey on which the filmmaker crosses the US and Scandinavia to talk to woman friends who participated in the revolution and were confined to the Islamic Republic's cells— an attempt to paint a deeply human picture of the interrogation and torture. The more powerful aspect of this film is that the director invites the women to meet and spend a few days together at the house of one of them; and in the course of their meals and conversations they each reveal some moving detail from their experience in Iran — some happy memories included, but also memories of rape by the police. Altogether this is no doubt a wonderful addition to the audiovisual history of one of the most important events of the 20th century, which occurred in response to an abusive police state only to instate an even worse police state in its stead. It is particularly important for the Egyptian viewer to see how abusive an Islamist system can be — to the point of committing crimes against humanity — despite the Islamists' rhetoric. Hanging Dates Under Aleppo's Citadel by the Lebanese filmmaker Mohamed Soweid is yet another film about revolution — this time about the ongoing events in Syria. It's a unique experiment in which, rather than travelling to Syria, Soweid relies on some 60 hours of footage by three cameramen: Mohamed Al-Basha, Mezr Amer and Mohannad Al-Naggar. Through editing this material, Soweid manages to tell the story of one of the Syrian Free Army's commanders, Mudar Al-Najjar (Abu Bakr), revealing the details of his life together with his fellow soldiers as well as providing interviews with him, his soldiers and three daughters at a refugee camp on the Turkish border. The importance of the film derives from its depiction of how an ordinary citizen from Aleppo becomes an army commander in battle and its documentation of the battles in Syria's second capital and their devastating effects. It ends with Abu Bakr lying in hospital having sustained an all but fatal injury.
