Perhaps exchange among filmmakers is the most important aim of film festivals. Yet in the case of the Luxor Film Festival of Egyptian and European Cinema, founded in September 2012, the aim is equally to use Luxor to promote tourism. That may be why its date was pushed to January, missing 2013 altogether, the better to capitalise on the winter season. Headed by Magda Wassef, the event included 11 full-length and 23 short films in the official competition as well as eight films in each of two fringe programmes: the New German Cinema; and Independent Egyptian Film. It made the vernacular poet Abdel-Rahman Al-Abnoudi its honourary president, also honouring actor Nour Al-Sherif for his lifetime's achievement with four of his films: Atef Al-Tayyeb's Laila Sakhinah (Hot Night) and Zaman Hatem Zahran (The Age of Hatem Zahran), Mohammad Al-Naggar's Naji Al-Ali and Said Marzouq's Zawjati wal Kalb (My Wife and the Dog). The Russian actor-director Vladimir Menchov was also honoured at the Luxor Festival, with screenings of his films including the Oscar-winning 1979 feature Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears. The festival opened with the young Egyptian filmmaker Amr Salama's new film La Muakhza (Excuse my French), the only Egyptian film in the official competition. Released in commercial theatres last week, the film went through a two-year battle with the censors for dealing with Muslim-Christian relations. An altogether successful work, its drawbacks may be due to the censors' intervention. Salama uses the device of a narrator to introduce the Christian family that the film is about, as if to present the cultural, economic and social dimensions of the heroes in its first few scenes: Abdalla Peter (Hani Adel), his wife Christine (Kinda Alloush) and their teenage son Hani (Ahmad Dash), the hero. It is an upper middle class family, Abdalla being a well-paid bank manager and Christine a very badly paid Opera House administrator. At first the viewer imagines he is dealing with one of those “meaningful films” with a clear moral message critiquing the social sector it is dealing with, which lives in westernised isolation. Yet no such stereotypical idea is adopted by Salama, who is rather depicting isolation as a result of wider social problems: even Hani's choice of sport, speedball, seems to reflect the sense of standing on ones own. The dramatic event in the script is how this isolation is broken. It happens when the father dies, taking with him the financial security and stability of the family. Christine is forced to move Hani out of his international school and into a public school where Salama has plenty of opportunity to depict issues of bullying and harassment as well as the decline in standards of education and teachers. The script draws out the teachers' characters, focusing on the headmaster who turns out to have no idea about the conditions of his students. The development of the protagonist's character is among the film's strongest points as it shows Hani's ingenious ploys to survive in a new and hostile environment, from trying to be a force of good among his peers to actually denying his religion the better to fit in. In his previous two films, Ehna et'abelna ‘abl keda (Did we meet beofre) and Asmaa, Salama relies on the classic dramatic structure and a traditional treatment so obvious in Asmaa. Yet in Excuse my French he employs a satirical technique closer to the documentary he made with Tamer Ezzat and Ayten Amer, Al-Tahrir: Al-Tayeb wal Sharis wal Siyassi (Tahrir: The Good, the Vicious and the Politician). This approach allows for a humorous analysis of the hero's crisis, though it also takes away from the viewer's immersion in the conventional sense. Likewise the cinematography, which reflects the mood of each setting-state of affairs, presenting the dusty public school in yellow for example. A bold and focused social critique, the film is nonetheless beset by a few problems that mar its accomplishment at the artistic level. One problem is dramatic structure. The fact that Hani manages to pass for a Muslim by avoiding his third name, Peter, calling himself simply Hani Abdalla, for example, is utterly unconvincing since his third name would have been obvious to teachers from the school registers and his official papers, so — in fact — would be his religious denomination. Another problem is the character of the mother, who is clearly irreligious: she never goes to church, and once the father dies she removes all the crosses and icons in the house. Yet at the end of the film she appears wearing a cross. Her story with the faith is never explained, and this is probably due to the censors' intervention. As it is, however, she comes across as incomplete and two-dimensional.
*** Two films in the official competition are worth mentioning. The Romanian filmmaker Valentin Hotea's Roxanne carries deep artistic and political value, registering the period in which the authorities in Romania allowed political activists to see their secret-intelligence files 20 years after the 1989 revolution that overthrew Nicolae Ceausescu. At the opening the hero, Tavi, a newspaper and magazine designer, is seen entering the government building where he discovers that his former girlfriend, Roxanne went to see a gynecologist without telling him while they were breaking up, right before marrying their mutual friend Sandu. The script follows Tavi's obsession with the idea that Roxanne — whose son with Sandu, Victor, is now 20 — was actually pregnant with his, Tavi's child. Moving in two parallel directions at once, the script depicts Tavi's search for clues and his mother's Alzheimer's: a powerful double take on the theme of memory. The characters and their concerns are very precisely drawn: Tavi's all-consuming obsession driving him to see Roxanne again after so many years, the beautiful and formerly promiscuous Roxanne's power and composure giving way to breakdown when she finds out about Tavi's determination to spend time with Victor and Sandu's transformation from a pleasant and welcoming old friend to a vicious informer when, during the three-way climactic argument at the end, we realise not only that Victor really is Tavi's son but also that Sandu had been the secret police's source of information on his friend Tavi's activities. A beautifully human film, Roxanne could not be further from direct political critique, yet it is a powerful statement on the persistence of the police state for decades after the ouster of the dictator. The second film, which proved very popular with both critics and viewers in the Luxor crowd, was the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Tsemberopoulos's The Enemy Within. In the opening scenes, the film documents the life of a quiet man who owns a plant and gardening shop, the camera revealing the precision with which he cleans and arranges the plants and moves on to his interaction with his wife, son and daughter — a very quiet conventional life rudely disturbed when one night a group of hooded men attack the house, ransacking it and raping the daughter. The director manages to avoid the action-film approach by moving straight from the start of the attack to the hospital where the family is being treated, priming the viewer that no one has been killed, then moving back in time through the events of that night as the hero slowly and gradually recovers. The helplessness he feels regarding his inability to protect his daughter is certainly one factor, but another is his neighbour, the army officer who suggests that he should take revenge. The film is thus divided into two halves, the first comprising the treasure hunt to find out who the criminals are and the second his flight after he kills the man who raped his daughter now that the man's family is after him. The film ends at the police station where the wife of the rapist is arrested with some of the hero's stolen belongings. He denies that the items belong to him, and the criminal's wife denies any knowledge of his face even though she saw him killing her husband. It's as if both parties have finally decided to behave as if nothing happened. As the director explained to the audience after the screening, though it is an account of the rise of violence in Greek society, this film was nonetheless written prior to the protests that shook Greece in the last two years. There is no connection between it and the country's current economic issues.
