Tracing the connection between page and screen, Hani Mustafa reviews Asafir Al-Nil (Nile Sparrows), currently on show across Cairo Some film viewers believe that a good film is a film that has a clear story and a traditional structure, with a tightly constructed plot. Yet such structure, drawn as it is from drama and the novel, is not the only mode of cinematic storytelling. Rather, it is one among many; perhaps the oldest, since there is no doubt that, when it emerged at the start of the 20th century, the film industry depended on conventional storytelling. This in turn derived its characteristics from literary narrative and its arts. Yet within decades of the Lumière brothers inventing filmmaking at the end of the 19th century, cinema had developed its own experiments in structure and composition, generating new narrative techniques. It is well known that early cinema was closer to visual chronicling and documentary than storytelling as such, but once the feature (fictional) film made its appearance, new spaces opened up for developing cinematic composition. In the first few decades of the 20th century, thanks to the arrival on the silver screen of ideas from the plastic, among other arts -- in Luis Buñuel's Le chien andalou, for example -- narrative structure developed in new ways. Still, literature -- and specially the novel -- made the greatest contribution to cinematic art in the world at large. In Egypt, since the 1940s, cinema has depended by and large on the novel, the earliest example being Mohammad Hussein Heikal's novel Zainab, which was twice transferred onto the silver screen (both times by Mohammad Karim): as a silent film in 1930, and again in 1952. Later on numerous films were based on the work of such novelists as Naguib Mahfouz, Ihsan Abdel-Quddous and Youssef Idriss. But perhaps Youssef El-Sebai remains the novelist who made the greatest contribution to cinema in the last century; and this was no doubt because of the structural simplicity of his novels, which created an appropriate basis for traditional storytelling in film scripts. Much like their own successors of the 1970s-90s, the Generation of the Sixties of Egyptian novelists, who succeeded Mahfouz, Idriss, Abdel-Quddous and El-Sebai, made a much smaller contribution to cinema which only became apparent in the 1990s. There are two principal reasons for this, I imagine. First, there occurred a transformation in the storytelling techniques deployed within literature itself, which became more complex than the traditional, plot-based structure of much cinema. Secondly, following a huge slump in the industry, film producers were no longer as bold about testing literary transformations and developments or taking any risks with their scripts, which tended to reduce to adaptations of mainstream American films. *** Based on the Generation of the Sixties novelist Ibrahim Aslan's Malik Al-Hazin (Heron), Al-Kitkat, directed by Dawoud Abdel-Sayed in 1991, is among the best known films of the last two decades. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Aslan's next novel, Asafir Al-Nil (Nile Sparrows), has now been made into an eponymous film written and directed by Magdi Ahmad Ali. It is one of a handful currently on show that are based on novels, and Aslan himself helped write the dialogue. The script employs the flashback technique to focus in on an elderly man named Abdel-Rehim (Fathi Abdel-Wahab), who leaves his bed in a government hospital, evidently while very ill (it becomes clear in the course of the film, if only by implication, that he suffers from kidney failure). This is when Abdel-Rehim meets, by accident, an ailing lady named Bassima (Abir Sabri), whose presence before him brings back memories, thereby setting off the central flashback. The script returns to the beginning, to Abdel-Rehim's youth, when he came from the countryside to Cairo looking for work. He found nowhere to live except for the house of his sister Nargiss (Dalal Abdel-Aziz) and her husband El-Bahi (Mahmoud El-Guindy), who works with the postal service. The film involves many complex relations, including Abdel-Rehim's love life in Cairo, starting from his relationship with his sister's neighbour Bassima, who is so pretty and chic the neighbours on Fadlallah Othman Street, in Imbaba, call her Bassima Moda. This is the principal dramatic line in the film, dealing with lower middle class society through a variety of amorous relations in which Abdel-Rehim engages, some leading to marriage while others remain illicit. Even more important to this film, however, are the human details pertaining to characters other than Abdel-Rehim himself, including Nargiss -- who is so afraid of the dark her sole concern about death is that the grave is dark. She goes so far as to demand of her husband that he should place a lamp in her grave once she is buried, so she could get used to her new surroundings. Aslan, a long-time Imbaba resident, used to work in the post, and his well-known novel Wardiyat Lail (Night Shift) draws heavily on this profession. His access to the intimate life details of the characters and the way Ahmad Ali utilises the information result in a remarkable perspective. El-Bahi, for example, because of his weak eyesight, has a motorcycle accident, and since the motorcycle is institutionally issued, this creates an administrative problem that becomes the main dramatic issue for this man, since as a result of it he is transferred from a postman to a desk employee (meaning that he must retire at 60 instead of 65). A number of scenes depict the official pleas he submits to the postal service, the ministry, even the presidency. This gives the viewer access to the suffering the character goes through, and how the notion of submitting pleas can become an obsession. Yet perhaps the worst part of the film is the scene in which El-Bahi performs, for the benefit of his family, a scene of Hamlet. It seems entirely out of context and patently unconvincing, with no purpose other than indicating that this modest civil employee happened to have attended university. Still, the script paints a beautiful picture of El-Bahi's death towards the end, when he lets it slip to his wife that he might have brain failure. As in Aslan's literary works, old age and the way it is depicted are among the most beautiful aspects of the film: Nargiss's own demise, and the senility that besets one of her neighbours, are equally powerful. All in all the film is entertaining despite a handful of technical issues: the ending, which seems forced, for example. Abdel-Wahab's acting is out of control in some scenes despite an overall performance that earned him the Best Actor Award at the Cairo Film Festival in November 2009. Like Abdel-Wahab's, the acting of Abdel-Aziz and Sabri is somewhat uneven. For his part El-Guindi, he demonstrates his abiding power and ability to convey the widest range of personalities; he should definitely have earned an award at one of the many festivals that featured the film. In the few scenes he appears in as El-Bahi and Nargiss's political activist son, the young actor Ahmad Magdi, the son of the director, gives a remarkable performance. One highly commendable side of the film is that, without compromising the convincing way in which it depicts poverty and the poor, it sets out the drama lightly without indulging in the melodrama of 1950s and 1960s Egyptian realist cinema. In this sense it is closer to the simple, easily digestible drama that emerged in the 1980s (during which a generation of filmmakers that included Ahmad Ali -- Atef El-Tayib, Mohammad Khan, Khairi Bishara, Dawoud Abdel-Sayed -- transformed notions of realism). Ahmad Ali did not make his first film, Ya Donya Ya Gharami, until the 1980s, but he was undoubtedly part of that movement; and unlike many of his other films, Asafir Al-Nil demonstrates not only just how much he does belong to it but how engaging its products can be.
