Focussing on music, Hani Mustafa reflects on Misr International's European Film Panorama, which closed at the Galaxy multiplex this week No one can deny the status of American film in the international market, or claim that it does not enjoy large-scale popularity among movie goers. But as recently as 20 years ago movie goers in Egypt enjoyed European as well as American and Egyptian films. Downtown movie theaters, for example, would show films from the Soviet Union, Italy and France. No such diversity has been in evidence in the last decade or so -- a fact that suggests that there is some degree of American monopoly over the Egyptian film market, which has led to the disappearance of European film screenings. Throughout the 1990s, indeed, only two European films found their way to movie theatres. The first, in 1995, was the Italian Il Postino, directed by Michael Radford, the second, in 1997, was the French film The Eighth Day, by Jaco Van Dormael. Nothing else was screened outside of film festivals. The importance of screening European films in Egypt derives from the fact that they often demonstrate to the average cinema goer what can be achieved without the benefit of huge budgets and digital technology -- that cinema depends, in essence, on the originality of the idea behind the film and the humanity it manages to intimate. This is particularly evident in European films, many of which deal with subjects that Hollywood tends to eschew. And it is a significant part of the phenomenally popular Misr International's two-week initiative championed by Marianne Khoury. Many of the films shown had either won international awards or received critical praise. Among them was the Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, which received the coveted Palm D'Or in the 2000 round of the Cannes Film Festival. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that the film is a landmark, for it combines both European and American stylistic strains. One of the earliest practitioners of the Dogma 95 movement, Von Trier uses hand-held, unsteady cameras that flit from one character to the next, following the flow of the dialogue, while at the same time presenting melodramatic subject matter. Von Trier's main achievement in this film is to combine melodramatic subject matter with the musical genre popular in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s -- a combination he develops simultaneously on two levels: the realistic, melodramatic line that ends tragically with the death of the protagonist; and the music playing in that character's mind while she confronts a wide variety of hardships. Music is also a major constituent in Exils, which earned its French filmmaker Tony Gatlif the best director's award at this year's Cannes. In the film a young Frenchman's trip in search of his family roots in Algeria is accompanied by a strong soundtrack. Accompanying this man is his girlfriend, who is of Algerian origin but neither knows nor wants to find out about her roots. She is a passive personality who just trails along from Spain to North Africa. From the first moment of the film and all the way to the end, which involves 10 whole minutes of Zar music, the viewer is regaled by a consistent outpouring of carefully selected music showing remarkable range. A different approach to Von Trier's, but one that is equally effective in evidencing difference from Hollywood. Music is a main feature of many feature and documentary films in the panorama, such as Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club, which chronicles the regrouping of a Cuban band many years after they stopped performing. Wenders relies not on complicated techniques but on the fluid, engaging and humorous conversations of band members. Mixed in are scenes of Havana street life. Here music is the subject rather than an aesthetic instrument or stylistic feature. The most expressive thing said about this film was the statement of the director's. He wanted to create a film like the waves of the sea, he did, comparable to the flowing of the band's music. Another beautiful aspect of the film is that Wenders eschews political topics completely, offering no take on the Cuban regime but simply an unpretentious presentation of his subjects, their music and the human conditions that inform their lives. The Dutch filmmaker Jack Janssen's We Loved Each Other So Much, another film about music, sets out to present the opinions of various Lebanese people of their legendary singer, Fairuz. Janssen offers a coherent documentary that skillfully weaves the open, spontaneous statements of the interviewees about their relationship with Fairuz, which sometimes reach an almost religious degree of fervour and reverence. Unlike Wenders, however, Janssen does allude to political issues in passing, giving the viewer the feeling that his film contains the seeds of several political documentaries -- a taxi driver recalling having been imprisoned for supporting the annulled right-wing Quwat Party, a doctor who, while studying in Syria, ended up spending eight years in prison for opposing Syrian presence in Lebanon. Some of these episodes are less humane than others, with a left- wing veteran of the Civil War and a Palestinian resident of the Shatila refugee camp, appearing less as individuals than types -- and not accompanied by the dreamier tunes of Fairuz. Despite demonstrating the extent to which the score affects the viewer's perception of any one scene, the film does not add up to a political statement. No doubt the experience has allayed Khoury's inevitable, initial fears, for no guarantee existed of a positive response on the part of the Egyptian viewer, with the films proving so popular that many screenings were completely booked in advance and latecomers could not be accommodated, their places having been taken. It was as if the European Film Panorama was a drop of water on dry land. More pertinently, perhaps, it proved to distributors and producers alike that non-commercial, non-Hollywood cinema -- documentaries as well as features -- could be very popular in Egypt.
