Marianne Khoury speaks to Mohamed El-Assiouty about the making of 'Ashiqaat Al-Cinema; Amina Elbendary reviews this documentary study of six pioneering women Projecting past and present Marianne Khoury has produced films for Youssef Chahine and Youssri Nasrallah among others. Her directorial debut was the documentary Zaman Laura (Le Temps de Laura/ Time of Laura) in 1999. Her latest film, 'Ashiqaat Al-Cinema (Les Passionnées du Cinéma/ Lovers of Cinema) is based on research by Mona Ghandour. The two- hour Egyptian-French documentary focusses on six of Egyptian cinema's pioneering women: Aziza Amir, Fatma Roushdi, Behidja Hafez, Amina Mohamed, Assia, and Marie Queenie. 'Ashiqaat is planned as one of 12 films that Marianne is producing on pioneer Arab women artists. In Lebanon Samir Habshi will make a film on Nazira Jimblat; in Algeria Ahmed and Amin Rashdi are directing Nisaa Munadilat (Struggling Women); projects are pending in Morocco and Palestine. In Egypt Mohamed Kamel El-Qalyoubi has already completed a film on Rose El-Youssef, Ahmed Maher will make a film on dancer Badiaa Masabni, while Mustafa Hasnawi will tackle singers Umm Kulthoum, Munira El-Mahdiya and Ratiba Ahmed. "Nadia Wassef, who plays the researcher/ documentary filmmaker in the film, is a researcher whom I had met twice before a common friend suggested she invite me to the AUC Press launch of her book Daughters of the Nile, a collection of photographs of 20th century women, because he knew I was interested in that period. I didn't want a professional actress to play the role and I had already auditioned several people. After the reception we went for a drink with my late friend Radwan El- Kashef, and we convinced her to play the role. "I did not think of playing the character myself. I lacked the guts to do it. The film itself was a big responsibility for me: production-wise and directing-wise. When you do a documentary like this you are involved in it down to the minutest detail. It would have been an additional task for me were I playing the role. It did not even occur to me to consider it. I wanted someone to be my alter-ego there, to substitute for me, yes, but not be me. "In the beginning every time I used an extract from an old film I put its title, date of production and director but later I decided to remove these and put them with the end credits. Why? It takes one third of the frame to display this information, in both Arabic and French, superimposed on the images. Also, some films are used twice, and they are inserted in a certain way into the overall structure, juxtaposed with the interviews to create a desired effect. Plus, the interviewees often mention the titles of the films, so it is easy to understand from which film a clipped scene comes. "I thought about adding the names and professions of all the interviewees too, but eventually decided to include only the names of the main interviewees, Samir Farid, Ali Abu Shadi, Youssef Chahine, Kamal Abul- Ela...etc. I couldn't put the name of everyone who said something in the film, otherwise it would have become a TV programme, and I wanted to create a more dramatic engagement than that. We understand who the people are from their input on the subject of the film, and the end credits include all the participants. In Mohamed Kamel El-Qalyubi's film on Rose El-Youssef, which we produced as well, he used superimposed titles much more extensively. It's really a stylistic choice. "The subjects? Well Aziza Amir was first an actress, then she became a producer, then she contributed to the scripts of many films. Fatma Roushdi was the first Egyptian female director and worked on a vast number of plays before she went into film. She was more of a theatre person. Behidja Hafez acted, produced and composed music. Amina Mohamed acted, produced, directed and was also a dancer. "The Leventines, Assia and Marie Queenie, are very important for me -- they started in the industry as actresses, participating in 15 and 21 films respectively, then emerged as very important producers, each responsible for more than 50 films. I feel closer to Assia and Marie Queenie, yes, because I'm a producer, but I'm still different, and the time we inhabit are different. "But what I wanted most was a diverse approach to the period. I admire the courage and guts of Fatma Roushdi and Assia's tenacity and hard-work. I like the diversity of the six characters and this is why I chose them. I was interested in an overview of the period in which they worked rather than individual aspects of individual careers. "I don't think I do the hagiographic thing, making them into superwomen. The film refers to the fact that Fatma Rushdi used to swear, and that she fought with Youssef Wahbi, and to rumours that Assia loved Ahmed Galal, all of which helps to humanise their images. Their dedication to cinema, that's what I wanted to capture, their art becoming a way of life. So it doesn't matter how many times Fatma Rushdi got married. Marie Queenie was in her 30s when her husband died, and still she dedicated all her life to her art. When the government took away their studio after the 1952 Revolution she divided the rest of the money in half: took a flat -- because they had lived in the studio as well -- and produced two films. Eventually, her son became a major director, like his father. "The process: well, initially there was a full research team headed by Mona Ghandour, working intensively for over a year. It would be impossible to interview every one who knew the six artists, and at some point there has to be a cut-off. You must stop, and construct the film, otherwise the interviewing can go on forever. There are too many topics that you can talk about in documentary films. Every interview, every sentence can make a film. It all depends on where you focus. "Then there was the watching of 30 two-hour films to select 30-second clips from each. All the extracts are chosen to tell the story I'm telling. Some of these I watched on video, some on 35mm at the National Cinema Centre. "It took six months to edit 60 hours of material, which even then did not include the film clips and stills included in this two-hour version. It had become like an obsession, but then you reach a point where you don't want to remove or displace anything; tampering with one shot might threaten the whole structure. There were endless possibilities, and I do not think for a moment I exhausted them all. I had to remove many stills for instance. "I came across a lot of things which I did not use. All this material is archived. As I'm proceeding with this project I'm discovering more and more stuff. "These women lived in difficult times. Women had still not removed the veil. I was trying to show that today's generation of women film directors -- Kamla Abu Zekri, Hala Khalil and Nawara -- face problems but they don't sit there doing nothing. Hala has an interesting film project, and lots of producers think so, but she never secured funding. I see them in the film discussing their problems and not being passive about it at all. And yes, the film makes the distinction between the "internal crisis" of Nermin Hammam and the crisis of the whole industry, which preoccupies the other three. However, I feel it's not a problem of this or that time period; if you know what you want to do then you can do it. "I'm not trying to be a feminist. I'm not trying to be pro-women in this film, even though the film is about women and it features many women from different generations. I don't mean that men don't have a problem, I'm not trying to say that women have more problems than men. "I had filmed much more material with the girls about the problems today but had I put this in the film it would have taken time and involved a different angle. The balance of ideas is what's important. I made it very difficult on myself by having six characters. I had to have the right balance for each character. And though I was often tempted to put more of today in the film that would, in the end, have made it a completely different project. "The first time we interviewed Nader Galal, Queenie's son, it was sound-only recording and I felt that to repeat this interview at the filming stage would have cost us the spontaneity and intimacy of reminiscing for the first time. I felt that the visuals -- a home movie of him as a child and both filmmaker parents -- perfectly matched his voice over. And in my earlier documentary, when I had repeated interviews, I found them problematic and discarded them in editing. It was not something I wanted to repeat. I feel that the moment Marie Queenie appears is a high point in the film; this shot is from a two-hour interview taken three years ago. Back then the plan was to make a documentary just on her. "When Amina Rizq talks, even though the film only features her in the episodes on Fatma Rushdi and Amina Mohamed, her aunt, you get a lot between the lines, about her relationship with these and with Youssef Wahbi. "The whole Alexandria section provides a temporal context, a historical background. It situates you in time. I could have removed it because it does not provide direct information about the characters, but I chose not to. Behidja Hafez and Fatma Roushdi came from Alexandria, where there was a cinema-screening culture at the turn of the century. From my point of view ample historical background -- provided by this episode and Samir Farid's comments at the beginning -- was essential, background about how women's political activism in 1919 led to the creation of a larger role for women in all walks of Egyptian life, about Laila, arguably the first Egyptian film, certainly the first to be given a public screening but which does not exist any more. But I was not going to concern myself with the kind of nit- picking of the sort was Laila first, or Rossetti's film. That does not matter. That's not what this film is about." Women who dare Marianne Khoury's second film, Les Passionnées du Cinéma, opens with Nadia Wassef, playing Nadia (herself? Khoury?), obsessing about her weight and her looks even as she begins her (re)search for women involved in the Egyptian cinema in the 1920s, the theme of this two-part two-hour long documentary. The film is part of a larger project, a series of films about pioneering Arab women in various fields, produced by Marianne Khoury. As it focuses on six women -- Aziza Amir, Fatma Roushdi, Behidja Hafez, Amina Mohamed, Marie Queenie and Assia Dagher -- the viewer is bound to be surprised by the extent of women's contributiom to cinema, as well as the ways in which it has been ignored. That there were women at all in Egyptian cinema in the 1920s is in itself remarkable -- a point critic Rafiq El-Sabban, in his introduction to the film's premier last Sunday at the Cairo Opera House Small Hall, clearly made. This was a time when women's liberation was still a twinkle in the minds of a brave few. The arts, and cinema in particular, were not considered the most honourable of pursuits at the time. Arab women -- and even men -- who chose cinema as their career were often shunned by their families and society. There are stories of families going into mourning for daughters who entered the film industry. But as men and women from respectable, occasionally aristocratic families, slowly joined the new medium --Youssef Wahbi and Behidja Hafez were both the children of Pashas -- it slowly became acceptable for women to work in cinema. Yet even within the prevailing, extremely conservative moral melieu, a substantial number of women entered the field. Inevitably, they paid a heavy price for this decision, whether in terms of their reputation and family relations (often women had to change their family name and adopt a stage name instead) or in terms of financial sacrifice. They dared and they paid the price. The women who are the subject of this documentary worked in many capacities: they all acted, Aziza Amir, Fatma Roushdi, Behidja Hafez, Assia and Marie Queenie produced films, Roushdi, Hafez and Amina Mohamed directed one film each while Hafez also composed music scores as well. Les Passionnées du Cinéma includes an interview with director Youssef Chahine in which he recalls the great lengths to which Assia, as producer, would go, walking around the set and berating any one who was not doing their job to her satisfaction. Fatma Roushdi developed a reputation as a hard-headed businesswoman, breaking with the legendary Youssef Wahbi and going on to form her own company to compete with his, offering rival productions of the same plays, while Marie Queenie continued to produce films, financing the projects down, literally, to her last piastre. Nadia's quest takes her, with laptop, to various cities: Cairo, Beirut, Alexandria, Damiette and Tanta. The starting point is decidedly contemporary, the empowerment of women today, the conference industry on the roles played by pioneering women and talks with various young women who are trying to work in cinema but somehow face obstacles. And while Khoury's love of her subject is palpable, it is obvious that in this particular film she has an axe to grind with regards to women's history. The first film she directed, Le Temps de Laura (1999) also revolved around a woman, ballerina Laura Laurella. In an early scene Nadia meets with artist Nermin Hammam who explains how, following film school, she failed to make films. Her art, though, retains a cinematic quality; her photographic panels often resemble sequences of film stills. But the obstacles are always within us, she says. Nadia also meets three young women filmmakers and talks to them about why they aren't making films. But these coffeeshop discussions, which intercept the search for the pioneers, don't lead anywhere in particular.We learn that there is little encouragement for young women at the Cinema Institute to study direction and photography, for example, that there is little encouragement for them in general, that it takes them ages to find funding for a film. So what's new? Nadia's search for the six women takes her to cinema critic Samir Farid, the source of much information, and an informative escort on many investigative walks. She visits the cities and streets in which each of the six was born, lived or worked. And everywhere she asks people appear ignorant of the historical figure who lived in their street. At some points it is even funny, watching her being led around a neighbourhood, endlessly being told that no one will be able to tell her anything. It appears impossible to agree which building in Maarouf street housed Fatma Roushdi's offices, which house in Tanta is Amina Mohamed's, where in Damiette Aziza Amir was born. It is a lost history, obscured because these women's contributions to cinema have been obscured. And it is this glossing over of achievement that this film seeks to right. Part of Nadia's research includes the compilation of a filmography for each of the six women, to which end she meets with the critic Ali Abu Shadi, editor Kamal Abul-Ela, Pére Mazloum at the Catholic Centre, actress Amina Rizq -- a neice of the late Amina Mohamed -- and Marie Queenie herself. She goes to booksellers in the hope of finding old magazines and music scores from films of the 1920s. The Catholic Centre's film library proves an invaluable resource, including clippings of reviews and ads for old films. And viewers are treated to clips of such vintage material as Amina Mohamed's 1936 Tita and Wong and the 1936 Laila, Daughter of the Desert, starring Behidja Hafez who was also its producer and director. Yet somehow, after the history has been rewritten and reclaimed, Nadia's original queries remain unresolved. Why are women doing less now when, according to so many criteria, they should be doing more? Of course, it is encouraging to remember that there were women in the 1920s, 30s and 40s who dared pursue unconventional careers. It is encouraging that there are women in 2002 such as Marianne Khoury (and Nadia Wassef) who dare to retrace their footsteps. But what are the young filmmakers in the coffee shop going to do next? Will they overcome the obstacles within and without?
