Bahib Al-Sima (I Love Cinema), opened amid a flurry of controversy. Mohamed El-Assyouti speaks with its director, Osama Fawzi "I have always hated doctors. But not only doctors. I hate all those who attempt to control us by pretending they know what is best for us," says Naiim, the narrator of Bahib Al-Sima. It is a point the film's director is keen to underline. "The film," he says, "is about rejecting repression. Cinema, in the title, is synonymous with freedom." Naiim suffers at the hands of Adli, his father (Mahmoud Hemeida) an orthodox Copt who fasts for over 200 days a year and believes that singing, cinema, painting and even conjugal sex during the fast are all sins. Fawzi readily concedes the autobiographical elements within the film: he shares a similar background with the scriptwriter, Hani Fawzi -- they attended the same kind of schools, the same classes at church, and both belong to the same generation of filmmakers. That Adli uses the Islamic terms halal and haram (permitted and forbidden) to proscribe or condone actions is, perhaps, an attempt to break free of sectarian confines -- the film is, Fawzi insists, about all forms of oppression -- so the refusal to use the Coptic formulation of "appropriate and inappropriate behaviour for the believer" becomes pointed. Tellingly, though, both cinema and watching television belonged to the latter category. The teacher of the Sunday classes Fawzi frequented practised hayat al- batouliya -- literally, the virginal life -- which is what Adli suggests to his wife. Her response is to criticise his inability to give or receive pleasure, or even use her as an instrument to derive pleasure. For good measure she throws in his proscription of art -- she is an artist turned headmistress -- before retorting "I don't know from where these ideas came to your head." Adli's position softens when he discovers that he is seriously ill, and that his son is also sick. It is then that he agrees to take his family to the cinema, marking a turning point that Fawzi insists is not one-dimensional. "Adli was not only psychologically broken when tortured by the police but also discovered that what he had thought of as strength was nothing more than the concealment of a profound weakness. His health is failing and he realises that hypocrisy is everywhere. His family, his superiors at the school, the president, the government, everyone is lying. And he knows that he, too, has been lying, not least when praying and wishing he could be the thief crucified to the right of Jesus. He desires to do whatever he wants only to repent at the last minute and be forgiven. It is a way of thinking that turns religious practice into a business deal. Man likes earthly pleasures, and these somehow become mistaken with 'sin' in all religions." Adli's wife had once had aspirations to be an artist but instead finds herself as the headmistress of a school who, in response to parental pressure, cancels art class. "She is," Fawzi suggests, "both a victim of society's repression and an instrument of extending it to her children. She refused to get married when widowed because of the gossip of her sister-in-law -- on whom six-year-old Naiim literally urinates during the funeral in the church. She feels that she has sacrificed much for her children -- she refuses to marry her lover, and spends much effort in attempting to shape their careers so that she will not be accused of failing to bring them up on her own." Amid this dysfunctional family only Naiim possesses any clarity of vision. Fawzi points out that "he was free from fear, while the mother, and particularly the father, were always terrified of God's punishment. Naiim is innocent, hungry for knowledge, curious and innately courageous; however, his father's oppression turns him into an oppressor in his turn and he starts blackmailing adults, threatening them to reveal their secrets if they do not take him to the cinema, which is very perverse. Oppressed, he finds means to reciprocate this oppression to achieve his goals. Both the nervous tick from which Naiim suffers, and the fact that his mother's talent as a painter is lost, indicate that oppression has lasting consequences. Nothing remains from the free creative spirit after years of repression. And the schools that used to propagate this system have, if anything, further deteriorated. Impoverished teachers who are themselves victims of the system go on to oppress the children they are supposed to teach." Adli's headmistress wife meets an artist who urges her to start painting again and to include art classes in the curriculum. An atheist and former political prisoner he tells her "man was born to fly, not to crawl on his belly like a worm." "This artist," Fawzi says, "believes that the oppression of authority, of a job or of a sexless marriage turns people to worms. An artist is an eagle, he ought not to be a chicken, and societies' food is art and freedom. I like this character, I like how he embodies the costs of political activism, which always entails the loss of some creativity." The political context of the story remained important, Fawzi explains, in providing insight in to the motivations of the characters though he is adamant that the parallelism between the protagonist Adli and Gamal Abdel-Nasser ought not to be stretched. He thinks it is too symmetrical to read the narrator's comment that his mother "took over the torch" of repression following his father's death as implying that she is a symbol of the Sadat regime. "It simply suggests that oppressive authority finds different guises to perpetuate itself," he contends. "Until now the margin of freedom is limited, and repression is the rule. The kind of tyranny that the father exercises over his family is the same that the Nasser regime exercised over him. Those in power, believing they know what is best, allow political hypocrisy to breed. The consequences of this hypocrisy are alike. Everything that is happening now, in the region, is a consequence of the same authoritarian rule that led to the 1967 defeat." The film is set in the 1960s because, Fawzi explains, "there are many nuances to the story that [he] would have not been permitted to include in a film directly representing contemporary Egypt and because the historic distance allows for a contemplation of the root causes of the problems we face now. The narrator, the adult Naiim, provides a perspective showing on the religious, political, family and school institutions of that period that have shaped the present." Making a period film in Egypt is difficult: the budgets are simply not available to construct exterior sets, which is why there are not many Cairo landmarks to situate the events in the 1960s. Fawzi would have liked to recreate the Shubra of the 1960s, but that proved too ambitious. "Had I insisted on filming moving trams and streets with 1960s cars the film would never have been made." He also decided against using newsreel footage. Bahib Al-Sima is Fawzi's third collaboration with cinematographer Tarek El-Telmissani. The director also says he would have stopped the production had set designer Salah Marei not been available: "For me he is indispensable and irreplaceable." He is no less stinting in his praise of costume designer Nahed Nasrallah. Fawzi also had the advantage of not having the cast dictated to him. For him the roles chose their actors, "as is evident in the harmony between them". One crisis that caused financial difficulties in post-production, delaying the film for three years, grew out of suggestions that the leads no longer had much box office appeal. These were finally scotched when Laila Elwi's last film, Hobb Al-Banat was successfully released. Just a week before its own release Bahib Al-Sima 's fate was still in the balance. The censor suggested the distributor should halt the publicity campaign and demanded that the film be viewed by the religious authorities for approval -- a move described in the press as a return to the Middle Ages. Fawzi argued that if the film was not released the producers would, if anything, make more money by selling the film to satellite channels and marketing it as "the film that has been banned in Egypt". A screening was still held for some clergymen as "guests", and they pronounced themselves pleased, thus avoiding the irony of banning a film that is about religious fanaticism that condemns and bans art. Comparisons with Giuseppe Tornatore's Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1989) -- both films have a child protagonist who loves cinema -- Fawzi rejects as superficial. "In my film cinema is synonymous with freedom, and the censorship Naiim faces at home is simply a reflection of a wider social oppression." Volker Schlöndorff's Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1979) though, might present a more lucid comparison since it, too, uses a dysfunctional family to point to wider social woes. Fawzi is keen, though, to point to the differences between Oskar, Schlöndorff's diabolical protagonist who willingly stops growing for 17 years, and Naiim, who is an ordinary child, as well as to the fantastical nature and epic scale of Gènter Grass's fable on which Schlondroff's film is based, and the autobiography of Hani Fawzi on which Bahib Al-Sima is based. "I think that this kind of reading of the film is both closed and representative of a kind of repression. I don't watch that many films, and only very few films really strike a chord with me. And even these I forget so I have to go back and see them every once and a while. Of course I did not create a new genre, but I am not influenced by any single filmmaker."
