Year round in recent times, the choices available to the Egyptian film lover have been limited to American blockbusters and formulaic Egyptian films about the underprivileged: the violence, debauchery and drug taking. The annual Panorama of European Film organised by the Misr International production company therefore comes as a life-raft. The programme doesn't stop at European fare: co-productions like the Kazakh director Emir Baigazin's debut Harmony Lessons, the French-German production filmed in Kazakhstan and screened in the Emerging Directors section this year, are set on other continents. Harmony Lessons won the Silver Bear for photography at the Berlinale as well as many other prizes. The photography is no doubt astonishing throughout, starting with the opening — in which the camera introduces the life of Aslan, the teenage hero, as he chases a sheep and then tries to slaughter it in a snow-covered remote area — but it has many artistic merits besides photography. It deals with the daily life of this young man, including the bullying to which a gang of schoolmates headed by a boy named Bolat subject him. Rather than telling a realistic story, Baigazin presents the two sides of his hero: his illness and the pressure he suffers from; and his intelligence and interest in science, which he utilises in torturing domestic insects, electrocuting a cockroach. This is as such a violent film but violence does not often register on the screen; except for the indignities and tortures to which Aslan is subjected by the police, most of the time it is inferred. Even when Bolat is found dead, the viewer never knows whether it was Aslan who killed him. The acting of the 13-14 year olds is remarkable: both Timur Aidarbekov as Aslan and Aslan Anarbayev as Bolat were remarkable. *** Also unseen is the violence in Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza neo-noir feature Salvo, an Italian production starring the Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri, the son of the actor-director Mohamed Bakri who starred in Elia Suleiman's 2009 The Time that Remains, carving a niche in world cinema. The film opens with Bakri as Salvo (whose name is not revealed until near the end of the film) waking up to another day, but the central event has already occurred. While transporting the leader of the gang to which he belongs from one place to another, Salvo had to go through a roadblock set up by a rival gang to kill them. The camera follows the hero as he searches for the person behind this conspiracy, sneaking into his house in a brilliant sequence to find the man's sister Rita (Sara Serraiocco) listening to a song, then speaking on the phone: he is right in front of her, but she does not see him — and it eventually transpires that she happens to be blind. Here as elsewhere the power of the film derives from the way in which the camera is invested with the tension of the actors, first Salvo and then the girl who, having detected his smell on the bed sheet where he sits down to deliberate his next step, knows there is someone in the house. It is largely through the soundtrack that the violence is conveyed: Salvo stops as the girl's music stops, he resumes his movement when the music returns; while the camera settles on the girl's face, pausing there, the viewer is told via sound only what is happening outside the frame: Salvo kills the man and goes, taking the corpse and the girl — tied up — with him. With Bakri's silent expressions and his sharp features tightening the tension even more, and Serraiocco passing from calm to fear with incredible smoothness, the action progresses beautifully. Salvo locks up the girl at the abandoned warehouse where he buries his rival, telling his boss that he killed them both. It is through the amorous relations that develop between the two of them while the girl inexplicably regains some of her sight that the film turns into a love story between a beautiful girl and an assassin just like the one between Jean Reno and Natalie Portman in Luc Bresson's famous Leon the Professional, something that is further underscored by Serraiocco's physical resemblance to the Israeli-American actress. This remains an indubitably enjoyable film, however, with Salvo sustaining a serious injury in the course of a confrontation with his own gang and Rita hides him in her house and they are seen on two chairs facing the sky and the sea in the window in four frames dissolving into each other — in the afternoon, at sunset, at night (when the viewer senses that Salvo has died and she goes) and finally Salvo alone with the first light of morning. Powerful and innovative directing and photography is weakened by the more conventional drama. It's as if this is two films in one: a brilliant festival competition contender, and a weaker human-interest action film. *** Since its launch in 2004, the Panorama has paid as much attention to documentaries as fiction films. The Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel's A World Not Ours won many prizes including the Peace Prize at the Berlinale. A Danish production, it deals with the lives of Palestinian refugees in the Ain Al-Helwa camp in southern Lebanon, where Fleifel — who immigrated to Denmark as a child — was born. This is what he gradually reveals in the film, which comes across as a personal documentary but actually uses one person's story to discuss a range of social, political and cultural issues. Fleifel owns a wealth of footage from the family's time in Dubai in the 1980s before they immigrated to Denmark, and this enables him to cover a three-decade time span. The director is seen as a child playing with his brother in the family's Dubai home — in one of many scenes the father regularly sent to his family back in Ain Al-Helwa, only for them to respond in kind — so that the viewer can also see what life is like at the camp, becoming witness to such events as the destruction of some houses in the course of the Israeli raid on Lebanon in 1982, and throughout the director's own commentary places everything in context. Fleifel documents the state of the refugees in Ain Al-Helwa across three generations. The oldest of these is represented by the by-now-octogenarian maternal grandfather he has visited every year for 20 years, who has grown irritable following the grandmother's death (though the grandmother too appears in earlier footage kept to the end of the film). The stranger character is the director's uncle Said, the younger generation, who is actually a much younger half-brother of the grandfather. The character, in his 40s, appears somewhat eccentric, spending his time fixing the wiring in the house and raising pigeons, and treated by others in Ain Al-Helwa as a slightly dim-witted character. His story is not revealed until midway through the film when it becomes apparent that he lost his brother, who happened to be in the militia guarding the camp and was only a year older than him, to a sniper's shot in 1982 — and has never been the same since. The more profound and dramatic character is the youngest generation, the director's own friend Abu Iyad, who works in the Fatah bureau at the camp and goes through stages of enthusiasm for the resistance followed by disillusionment and the risky trip to Greece via Syria and Turkey — without papers. Fleifel travels to Greece to film Abu Iyad but he shows only once in a scene in which the man seems unhappier than ever before. The film ends with titles on the screen informing the viewer that the Greek authorities deported Abu Iyad back to Lebanon.
