So how did the idea of Al-Sifara fil-Imara come about, and how was the film made? Director Amr Arafa and script-writer Youssef Maati tell Mohamed El-Assyouti all Though a huge hit, a function as much of its controversial topic as of its comic appeal, Adel Imam's sensational vehicle Al-Sifara fil-Imara (The Embassy in the Building) is directed by, Amr Arafa, who, with only one film to his name, has barely begun his career. An expensive project, this is Imam's first collaboration not only with Arafa but also with cinematographer Wael Darwish, set designer Samer El-Gammal and costume designer Maha Awwad. It was Imam who decided on the cast -- something the young director, trusting the superstar's experience, was not too uncomfortable with. Arafa was born and grew up in the neighbourhood of Al-Manial. As a Cairo University student he would walk to campus over the bridge daily. He therefore witnessed first-hand the changes Kobri Al-Gamaa (University Bridge) underwent over the years. When the embassy was first established in one of the buildings overlooking the bridge, walking along the stretch of the pavement it overlooked was prohibited. One had to walk on the opposite side. "I saw the before and the after," Arafa points out. "I liked scriptwriter Youssef Maati's idea," he recounts, "especially his suggestion that the protagonist should be someone who is blissfully ignorant of political reality to make his experience all the more shocking, in an ironic way." When the script was completed and submitted to Imam (who has acted in over 120 films), the latter did not respond for a month; it later transpired that it was a difficult decision for him, since it involved a sensitive topic he had never tackled. "The Palestinians I've spoken to are very happy to have a superstar of Adel Imam's status address the issue," Arafa says. "The reaction of the Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, who dream of the return of their compatriots in the diaspora, is positive, because they have first-hand experience of the conflict. Palestinians who object to the idea of a child going to Palestine to join the Intifada have probably never lived in Palestine." Worth noting is that the character of Iyad, a Palestinian child who returns to Palestine, only to be killed by Israeli soldiers, is no other than Arafa's own middle son, Tareq. In response to negative reactions to the film's ending, when Sherif Khairy and Dalia Shohdi (the politically clueless engineer and the communist activist, respectively) are married in the midst of a Palestinian solidarity demonstration, Arafa points out that this is but a traditional cinematic happy ending, unrelated to the film's political content. "Christians marry Muslims, children from Islamic fundamentalist families marry communists. Especially today, amorous arrangements are likely to forgo background and political affiliation. I think interpreting the marriage as a prophecy of the triumph of the left on the Egyptian street is forced and contrived." Indeed when Arafa and Maati started working on the film, the Kifaya movement was not yet in the spotlight, and no one had any idea that the constitution would be changed and a multi-candidate presidential election introduced to coincide with the film's release. It is unfair to accuse the film of ridiculing today's protests in preparation of the upcoming presidential elections. "Back then, the issue was economic normalisation and the Qualified Industrial Zones agreement. This was a subject no one had addressed, and opposition to normalisation is the film's running refrain." During the protests demonstrators were chanting "Mish hansalim, mish hanbi', mish hanwafiq 'al tatbii" (We will not surrender. We will not sell out. We will not agree to normalisation). The opening shots of Dubai, aerial, panoramic views of the architectural and natural attractions of the Gulf seaside are intended not only to show its beauty but to emphasise the protagonist's removal from politics: "There was no comparison intended with Egyptian street life. Most of the action take place in the flat itself, which set designer Samer El-Gammal built in the studio, and a houseboat overlooking the Nile. Both are typical Egyptian settings." Equally realistically, the leftist conference was filmed at the headquarters of the left-wing Tagammu Party. Arafa is most proud of the penultimate scene, however, in which the Israeli ambassador insists on bringing his guests into the flat of the Egyptian citizen: "This dramatisation of Israeli settlement drive, of people invading and occupying an entire house down to the bedroom, is a seven- minute silent scene, in which Adel Imam made one of the best performances in his entire career. After making the audience laugh for nearly two hours, he suddenly asks them to respond to a tragic situation." Arafa concedes that the Israeli ambassador is ultimately a one-dimensional character: "I considered altering the stereotype, working closely with Maati, but this proved difficult. The intuition we worked on was that, in a political satire of this kind, stereotyping was not such a bad idea in the end. Still, the ambassador has a human side to him. He approaches the protagonist and tries to befriend him. Though in the end he does turn out to have ulterior motives." Arafa believes in peaceful demonstrations, a commendable sign of civilisation, as he describes them. The satirical finale is rather a comment on how violence breeds violence. "Why attack a petty soldier or a young officer, simple people who are doing their job? Demonstrators should express their opinion, but they must not forget that members of the police are human beings and citizens who may in fact share their beliefs and grievances, but are placed on the other side by virtue of professional obligation. The rapprochement between riot police officer Khaled and the protagonist is meant to show just that officers are not so different from demonstrators, even though their uniform places them in an antagonistic relation to them." Arafa believes, finally, that 90 per cent of the Egyptians are like Sherif Khairy, who has been politically absent-minded for over 20 years. He awakens, as it were, to writer Ali Salim advocating normalisation and pop star Boussi Samir performing erotically charged hits, things which would not have been conceivable in the past: "As concepts that have a bearing on our lives, political consciousness and identity have been dormant for decades; now is the time to wake up. We need to look at our present reality and plan 40, 50, 60 years ahead." The protagonist repeats what he has heard, parrot-like, so that, when he is forced to speak at a conference, he can only repeat the refrain of urban folk star Shaaban Abdel-Rehim's hit "Bakrah Israiil" (I Hate Israel), heard coincidentally while smoking hashish in the company of friends; later he bumps into the Israeli ambassador in the lift, and again he repeats what he heard the leftist leader shout out at the conference. An honest man, Sherif Khairy even confuses tatbi' (normalisation) with tazbit (arranging a date). It is only gradually, and thanks to his growing love for Dalia, that he begins to understand the political jargon and, more importantly, the reality it describes. Pleased that the film has been well received on the whole, Arafa is glad the film was spared being previewed by the Israeli ambassador, something, according to Arafa, that the ambassador had politely if somewhat shamelessly asked for during his recent meeting with Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni. Youssef Maati's most recent controversial contribution was a serial comedy he wrote for Abu Dhabi television, Irhabiyat Sharon (Sharon's Terrorisms). Its broadcast generated much discontent in Israel: Shimon Peres called it anti-Semitic at a press conference; Maariv newspaper campaigned to have it banned and its author punished; Maati received death threats, and for three months was accompanied by security police. Yet he scripted two of this summer's films, both potentially explosive: the first deals with normalisation with Israel, the second with the US invasion of Iraq; already the latter has upset both the US Embassy in Egypt and the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, whose daughter filed a law suit against the producers. The security guards are back, but Maati continues to have fuul and taamiya sandwiches in an unpretentious Mohandessin restaurant, where the present writer was asked to meet him, washing them down with a shisha. He requires little encouragement to talk. What if someone found out they were living next door to the Israeli Embassy, he immediately begins, explaining the idea behind Al-Sifara fil-Imara (The Embassy in the Building), comedy superstar Adel Imam's latest vehicle ( see review above ). "A good film will always start with a question. This is the first film to address the topic of normalisation with both courage and simplicity. Usually it's the subject of elitist intellectual discussions, but this film brings it down to the level of the man on the street." Maati does concede that he pokes fun at terrorist organisations, which he is careful to distinguish not only from respectable arms of political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, but the opposition as a whole. "I consider myself an intellectual," he explains, asked about communists. "No self-respecting intellectual can be right-wing. At the same time I don't like to be out of date. In the film we see an entire family who have been imprisoned and this is my way of saying that communists are the most radical and fundamental dissidents in the country." The activist characters in question, cousins of Dalia the love interest of Sherif (Imam), are indeed both committed and intelligent; they head the student union at Ain Shams and Cairo universities. As the action unfolds one is shown reading Love in the Time of Cholera, while the other presents Imam with a book for his birthday, which is promptly thrown out of the window. "They are brilliant," Maati says, "but they're too immersed in a subjective reading of history, all their efforts spent on notions no longer relevant to the people. They don't realise that communist ideas fell, all of them, with the Berlin Wall." Despite the obvious association, Maati insists that there is no connection between the communist leader Shohdi Attia, who died under torture in 1960, and the film's Shohdi Soliman (Hanaa Abdel-Fattah), Dalia's uncle; he used the name, he says, simply to evoke a communist atmosphere. The film, he says, is not against demonstrations, however much it satirises them: having Sherif and Dalia get married in the middle of the demonstration at the end is rather to signify that a new generation with an even firmer stance against normalisation is being born. Yet the ending angered both right- and left-wing commentators, especially Palestinians, who saw the dramatic transition that led to Sherif wholeheartedly adopting Dalia's anti-normalisation position -- the murder of a little boy, Iyad, a friend of his -- as a cheap trick that prostitutes rather than affirms the cause; many fended the accusation it invoked: that Palestinians will expose their children to danger to further a political agenda. "Any film tackling such a sensitive topic is bound to offend some people," Maati says. "I think art no longer plays a prophetic role, it just comments on the present and the past. And here too I wanted to look at the present moment in Egypt and the Arab world. Iyad is a kind of dramatic equivalent to the widely publicised case of Mohamed El-Dorra who, murdered in cold blood by Israelis, became a symbol of Israeli aggression first in the media, then in the Arabs' collective consciousness. But no one thinks about the person or circumstances of El-Dorra, it's his symbolic value that counts. So it seems right to invent an equivalent in the framework of the film, to put the incident in historical perspective: they shoot children, don't they. That, finally, is the truth of it." Sherif and his friends smoke hashish while surfing satellite television channels: they watch pan- Arab nationalist Mustafa Bakri and pro- normalisation writer Ali Salem speaking, then the pop singer Boussy Samir performing Hot enno'at ala elhurouf (Get This Straight). Every time the channel flips they agree with what is being said. "Such confusion is characteristic of the Arab street," Maati suggests. "People agree with everybody and no one in particular, with the result that all voices are lost in this cacophony." He points up the criticism he has received, on purely political grounds. "Everybody wants to appear the hero in the film, no one wants to own up to the state of political and intellectual chaos in which we live. The problem is not so much that we celebrate the ugly, it's that we fail to value honesty and transparency." Thus cartoonist Mustafa Hussein's statement to the effect that, while caricaturing several disparate political orientations, the film manages nonetheless to represent them sounds a positive note for Maati: "The level of confusion is astounding, and what happens to the protagonist is meant to demonstrate this: one day he is an anti- normalisation hero, the next day he's a traitor. Well, characters like the riot policeman who endorses the protests and the child who joins the Intifada and dies; they've made their choices. The film is an invitation to the viewer to make his own choice. That's all it's about in the end." Nor should Imam's statements, which upset many left-wing parties, imply that the actor, much less the script-writer who worked with him, is against demonstrations. He merely objected to the possible outbreak of violence as a result: "The film is a political satire, like my books, Love to Hate America for example. It looks at Israel, and what it's doing to Arabs. I needn't comment on the upcoming elections to make this point. But I don't see how the film could be understood as propaganda for the government when, being firmly anti-normalisation, goes against the grain not only of the government's peace stance but the more recent Qualified Industrial Zones agreement. It's a film about Egyptian reality, how developments play out in it." Maati believes satire to be the highest form of comedy: here as elsewhere, in producing satires of communists, nationalists, Islamic fundamentalists and pro-normalisation businessmen -- no less the successful engineer who has no understanding of normalisation, the opportunist lawyer, the depressed divorcé and the ventriloquist opposition journalist -- he is, according to this line of thinking, not only illuminating the present-day Egyptian socio-political spectrum but practising high art. "Dramatically," Maati further explains, "we see things from the viewpoint of the protagonist, an average citizen, apolitical and care-free, only interested in living peacefully in his flat, enjoying what pleasures ordinary life has to offer. His confusion is characteristic of the man on the street, and so is the way he responds to both pro- and anti- normalisation discourse -- verbal gymnastics he cannot relate to." Maati is only really interested in the average viewer's response, which he personally monitored in several downtown theatres: "The film managed to dissolve the line separating elitist intellectual discourse from the common understanding of the issue as it figures on the street."
