Through the course of Egyptian cinema, starting with Kamal Selim's Al-Azimah (Courage, 1939), directors like Salah Abu-Seif and Tawfik Saleh have made films out of the real-life dramas of the lower classes, producing what came to be known as the realist school. In the 1940s-1960s, however, the working-class neighbourhood filmed inside studios lie Misr, Al-Nahhas and Al-Ahram had the same unchanging aspect and reflected middle-class ideas about the poor and their housing. Until the end of the 1970s realism derived, rather, from the drama and the characters. At the start of the 1980s a radically different generation of realist directors — Atef Al-Tayeb, Khairi Bishara and Mohamed Khan — began to film outside the studio and on site, seeking an audiovisual verisimilitude. Whether in films set in Cairo like Darbat Shams (Sunstroke), Al-Harrif (The Pro), Ahlam Hind wa Kamiliya (“Dreams” of Hind and Kamiliya), Zawgat Ragul Muhimm (An Important Man's Wife), or in a film set in Alexandria like Maw'id ala Al-Ashaa (Dinner Appointment) or one set in the countryside like Kharaga wa lam Ya'ud (“Last seen when he left the house”), Khan stood out in that his films truly achieved that kind of identity with their real-life subjects. Such detail-filled realism is to be noted in Khan's latest film, Fatat Al-Masna' (Factory Girl), which is now showing: a dramatic structure forged out of the alleyways of present-day shanty-town Cairo, which are even narrower than those in Ahlam Hind wa Kamiliya. As Salwa Khattab playing the mother of the protagonist Hayam says, an alleyway is only wide enough for two people walking close together. Unlike films of the past, Factory Girl deals with the issue of class without any allusion to the romantic dream — current following the July 1952 Revolution — about removing class boundaries. The class question is rather between Hayam (Yasmine Rais), who works at a factory, and Salah (Hani Adel), an engineer not much higher on the social pyramid, who lives in a traditional working-class neighbourhood with buildings dating from the 1940s rather than the 1990s. Screenwriter Wessam Soliman, Khan's wife, managed to produce a kind of tribute to the late iconic actress Soad Hosni, who often played the strong working-class young woman facing woman's oppression head on, producing a landmark performance as the belly dancer's daughter in Hassan Al-Imam's 1972 Khalli Balak men Zouzou (Beware of Zouzou), which had a remarkable year-long run in commercial cinemas. In many previous films Khan used radio as a principal element of the score, reducing the amount of music as if to rely as much as possible on the soundtrack of reality. State radio was indeed a main aural reference point for Egyptians, especially among the lower middle class. Yet in Factory Girl Khan also uses many of the songs Hosni performed in her films to express various dramatic dimensions. In the romantic scenes where she tries to draw close to Salah, for example, the background is a song from Zouzou in which the character taunted the “cool” young man she liked. References of this kind abount: the scene of Salah's wedding, when Hayam dances with hidden melancholy, is a direct reference to Zouzou dancing instead of her mother in the 1972 film. Yet what is the difference between Hayam and Zouzou? It is principally a difference of the times: in the sixties, as the screenwriter and vernacular poet Salah Jahine saw it, a belly dancer's daughter could presumably capitalise on the progressive atmosphere to make her mark, studying at the Faculty of Arts of Cairo University and falling in love with a theatre director (Hussein Fahmi). Hayam, by contrast, lives in conservative times, perhaps most clearly embodied by the character of her aunt (Salwa Mohamed Ali), who lets her boss at the private phone centre where she works sexually harass her and supplements her income with a job as a maid that she keeps secret from everyone including her daughter, whom she must provide for in this way. Hayam hails from the slums, where gossip and prurience abound. The factory is her world, her life and love, and that is where society seems to end. Yet she is like Zouzou too in that she tries to live as she wants and to express her love to Salah. It is this constant evocation of Hosni that makes up the aesthetic drive of the film, something that ends up making it somewhat predictable — there is a constant feeling that you have seen all this before. This is especially true of the plot line, which revolves around the rumour that Hayam slept with Salah in an almost exact repetition of Mahmoud Dhulfuqar's 1965 Al-Thalatha Yuhibounaha (All Three Love Her), also starring Hosni. Yet the film is not without its pleasures. In the details of the settings and the characters there is much to engage: the dilapidated wooden balcony in Hayam's house, the iron gate of the factory, Salah's old-style apartment... Khan meticulously selects his locations and his director of photography Mahmoud Lotfi records them in natural light bringing out their beauty without the slightest sense of artifice. It is interesting to note that realism in Egypt has been synonymous with the working class, something that is as true of theatre and perhaps even visual art as it is of cinema. Khan remains one of the pillars of this mode of creative endeavour, and it is only fitting that — as the son of a Pakistani-British man and an Egyptian woman who nonetheless never felt anything but Egyptian even while he was studying in Britain — he should finally be granted Egyptian citizenship: an event widely celebrated in intellectual and artistic circles to coincide with the release of this film. Khan has established his Egyptianness on the screen since his first film, Al-Raghba (Desire), in 1979; yet it took him that long to have official proof of it granted by interim President Adli Mansour.
