Mohamed El-Assyouti offers an exciting foursome Tonight the Film Unit of the Performance and Visual Arts Department at the American University in Cairo is screening four short Egyptian films by young filmmakers. Ragilha (Her Man) is a 10-minute-long film depicting a first wife's attempt to win back her husband from his second wife. The husband is clearly not around all the time. He does not work in the same place as the women live. The second wife was but a teenager when she got married to him -- just like her predecessor, who was only 15. One day, while both await the husband's return together, the second wife, childlike, is scared from a thunderstorm. In bed, she holds onto the sex-deprived older woman. And that night the relationship of the two women takes an intimate turn. The next day, the first wife reports to the husband that the new wife brags about the marks he leaves on her body, for instance, the love-bite above her breast. In a fit of jealous rage, the husband beats the younger woman and goes with the old wife into her bedroom. She promises to cook okra for him. Based on a short story by Ahdaf Souif, directed by Ayten Amin, shot and edited by Mohamed Fathi or "Kaisar", Ragilha, was shown earlier this year at Clermont Ferrand Film Festival, the most important event of its kind, which takes place in France every year. Ragilha depicts a world where women are reduced to prisoners in their house and only required to fulfil the sexual and gastronomic needs of their spouse. They are denied the right to sexual needs themselves. The first wife refuses to comply with the flirtations of a neighbour even though her husband stopped sleeping with her since he took a second wife. However, she also has her needs, and that is why she schemes to win her husband back. Behind the phobia that some Egyptian audience members have of addressing the subject matter of women's sexuality is a denial of woman's ability and right to enjoy sex. That Egyptian society still practises female genital mutilation (FGM) on a very large scale, can be fathomed simply by looking at the way films and the media treat women narratively and audio-visually. It would not be missing the mark to call the issue of women "the circumcised area" of the Egyptian screen. Ragilha is the third short film by Amin, which she did in completion of the requirements of her study of filmmaking at ArtLab. Despite its rough amateur look and being a tad too short to allow the characters enough time to emerge on screen, it is a remarkable endeavour in a heavily repressed society, where the subject of woman is perhaps the most repressed topic of all. Central (Call Centre) is about 20-minutes long, written and directed by Mohamed Hammad. It has a young woman who works as a phone operator as its protagonist. Through her voice-over we overhear her thoughts about the society surrounding her. Bored during her long working hours, she makes a habit of listening to the phone calls taking place in the private phone exchange where she works. Tharwat phones restaurants and gets excited as he harasses the women who pick the phone on the other end. Umm Waheed, wife to 'Amm Arabi, sleeps with Karam. Since he became diabetic and stopped sleeping with his wife, the driver husband takes extra shifts in order to spare himself the embarrassment. Still, he is not spared her name-calling: "pimp". The protagonist's brother had a hairdresser business, which he used as a cover for prostitution activities. When he was discovered, he shut down the business, grew a beard and turned into a religious fundamentalist. His assistant became his wife and she put on a full veil (niqab). However, she takes what opportunities she can to cheat on him. The brother uses the help of his friend Yasser to take back the mobile phone Karam stole from him, which he had stolen from his sister. The protagonist feels that she can see "everyone in the nude" and that as they leave they pay her the price of watching them. She concludes that "We all sin. We all know." She also has stakes in the show, and she would like to make her secret phone call from somewhere far from her work place. Resorting to freeze-frame while introducing characters and using the voice-over narration (read by Doaa Te'ima) as a unifying element, the film creates an effective mood. Hammad had previously written Al-Genih Al-Khamis (The Fifth Pound) -- about a public bus ride that a young man makes habitually in the company of different girls, and in silent agreement, they make out in the public bus as long as they leave a pound's tip to the driver. In a concluding sequence the driver makes out with the woman: was it his fantasy, the girl's, the young man's? This is not important. What is interesting about both films is the final reversal in which the observer or witness of another's "secret" and "illicit" sexual activity shifts from a position of voyeurism and exploitation -- by receiving fees for his supervision of the act -- to one of active participation, who joins in the transgression. This reversal is characteristic of self-conscious filmmaking, which critically questions the tendency of traditional cinematic representation to encourage unchecked voyeurism and identification in an audience passively living someone else's dream. Central tries to make audio-visual art with very little means, and its forte remains, like Al-Genih Al-Khamis 's, Hammad's monologue, which includes explicit language. Here Hammad challenges many of the taboos that are enforced by official and social censorship. There is an attempt to render Egyptian society completely exposed, revealing all its maladies and deformities -- hypocrisy, exploitation, insensitivity and roundabout ways of going about things. Typically, the conservative audience attacks such films, claiming that they are not representative of society. However, they overlook the fact that dramatic license allows the filmmaker to create whichever world he personally sees. In Hammad's case, many film enthusiasts see the truth in his social representation. is Rami Abdul- Jabbar's 15-minute-long film. The film's producer, director and editor, Abdul-Jabbar wrote the screenplay with Ramy Yehia. The story is about two young men selling clothes in the street who are chased by the police and have their commodities confiscated. To pay back their boss they undertake a job to return to her the LE5,000 -- the "dead money" of the title -- which another boss had never paid back. This simple story of greed is reminiscent of Geofrey Chaucer's Canterbury tale about the three friends with the moral: "Radix malorum est cupiditas" or "Greed is the root of all evil." The plot of Filous Mayyeta takes several twists. There is a girl. There is hash and alcohol. There is a knife and blood. All these elements which make for interesting visual content are used for maximum screen potential. Furthermore, the film is set in everyday places that are familiar to most Egyptians; the performance is generally solid. However, there is little in this film that would make it immediately strike one as Egyptian. It is a good piece, with a long cast list and a lot of care invested in every bit of its mise-en-scène and sound details, yet its achievement resides in Abdul-Jabbar's sense of timing. Rhythm is key. The whole 15 minutes flow like an extended song. Highly stylised, the film's frantic pace conveys the dog-eat-dog mood of its world to the viewer. Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) was an influence on Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996) and both are renovations of the gangster genre. They are the direct ancestors of Filous Mayyeta, in which the use of fast- paced cutting, wide lenses and occasional long tracking shots bring the genre closer to today's audience, which is brought up on music videos. With sound by Tamer El-Demerdash, music by Ahmad El-Sawi, photography by Yehia Fahmy and fair performance by Abdel-Aziz Tuni, Ali Sobhi, Mona El-Masri, Sahar Abdel-Hameed and Mohamed Awad, Filous Mayyeta makes for a satisfying viewing on all levels. Sabah Al-Fol (Rise and Shine), a nine-minute single long take is based on a short story by Dario Fo, starring Hind Sabry and directed by Sherif El-Bendary. It is produced by the National Cinema Centre and is the winner of the jury prizes at the National Film Festival (2006) and the Ismailia International Film Festival (2006) as well as the Golden Hawk award at the Rotterdam Arab Film Festival (2006). Sabah Al-Fol depicts a woman who wakes up in a rush and prepares to take her child to the nursery. In direct camera address she utters a monologue lamenting her lot as a wife. Her husband had grown callous and uncaring with time. She has to work, to be a mother to her little son and a pleasure object to her husband. The role of wife and mother imposed on her by society does not give her any chance for independence; she cannot discover the sources of her own pleasure. El-Bindary's emphasis on the unity of time by using a long-take also stresses how the conjugal house becomes a trap for the desperate young wife. Literally unable to locate the keys to the flat, she is unable to leave lest she fails to get in again. As if caught up in a time-warp she is so caught up in her daily routine that all days become the same to her. Sisyphus-like, she is the eternal slave. Although it is early morning, the protagonist does not open the windows, and hence the cold- coloured interior of the apartment is bathed in shades. The mediocrity of this middle-class household is evident in the veiled wife's modest dress and in the furniture and décor. This is the only film in this PVA screening which was shot on film; the rest were shot on digital video.
