Timetabled difficulties

Iran, the Maghreb and more Iran: Hani Mustafa attempts to make the round of the 25th Cairo Film Festival's downtown venues
Iranian film has enjoyed unprecedented success for a number of years. In 1997, Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry gleaned Canne's prestigious Palm D'Or, paving the way for a number of subsequent triumphs: Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboard received Canne's special jury prize in 2000; Jafar Penahi's The Circle won the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion in the same year; and Iranian cinema has since come to enjoy a unique status in film festivals worldwide. The attention festival audiences pay Iranian films reflects the fact that, for the most part, they are not screened outside festivals. Knowledge of Iranian film has turned into a criterion for judging familiarity with world cinema and understanding the latest trends: for an aspiring film critic to establish himself, all he has to do is to watch as many Iranian films as possible.
I was reluctant to write about the 25th Cairo International Film Festival's Iranian fare, feeling enough had been written about it in the context of previous rounds and other festivals. Determined instead to tackle contemporary film from the Maghreb, I reassured myself that, since they met with success in European festivals, these European coproductions -- featuring on more than one of the programmes -- may well be worth while, though such films have been criticised, notably in Tunis, as a form of folklore that plays up the exotic aspects of life in the Maghreb while treating the human condition in a superficial way, manufactured to cater to the tastes of the European producers who fund them. Such, to a significant extent, is the work of Farid Boughedir, Nouri Bouzid and Moufida Tlatli, whose Mawsim Al-Rijal (The Men's Season) is being screened in a special Francophone programme. The chance to see Nabil Ayouch's Ali Zaoua, on the other hand, motivated me to write about the Maghreb. It is a pioneering experiment in that it employs ordinary people in place of actors, resorting to the reality of the environment it depicts, down to the last detail. Such, I thought excitedly, were the methods employed by contemporary Iranian cinema and the Dogma 95 school of filmmaking.
Yet neither impatience with the hype surrounding Iranian fare (and, more importantly, its promoters) nor any amount of enthusiasm for our western neighbours could prevent me from writing about Iranian cinema. There was one overriding factor, after all: what was actually screened in the festival's venues, as opposed to what was advertised in the programmes. Indeed the constant reshuffling of programmes, especially Downtown, has been one of the festival's main drawbacks through the years. Downtown theatres seem to favour "adult"-rated fare beyond any sense or sensibility, a misfortune unique to Egyptian festivals, for throughout the Middle East, even the least prestigious events do not suffer from this unwarranted craze; and even though actor Hussein Fahmi, the head of the festival, promised to force film theatres to abide by the programme, his promises, alas, have not been fulfilled. Having seen Ali Zaoua in the Carthage Festival last year, I wanted to see it again to refresh my memory: new to Arab cinema, the experiment deserved at least this much attention. Yet the film theatre had replaced it with another, "scene"-laden offering; and I had to seek out another subject. Circling the downtown venues, what should I stumble on but an Iranian film.
Fereydoun Jerany's Fire and Water, moreover, proved a surprise. With Iranian films, one admires two characteristics in particular: a simple but satisfying approach to both the art of filmmaking and the subjects of the films in question, and the Iranians' concern with working-class, especially rural, society. Fire and Water, by contrast, takes place in Tehran, telling a somewhat conventional story (unlike the films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami, for example) of a novelist, Ali, who suspects his wife of infidelity. At one point, overcome with rage, he slaps her, leaving the house with the feeling that his marriage is over. Next we encounter him on his way back from his publisher friend, when a woman, Mariam, seeks his help: she is exiting an expensive car and cursing its owners. He hesitates -- she seems to be a prostitute -- but she finally invites him to her house, where she is forced to hide him in the bathroom on the arrival of her cousin, Majid. In the ensuing brawl, Majid violently beats up Mariam: Ali keeps to his word, however, having promised to stay in the bathroom. Leaving Mariam's house finally, he goes home to find his wife murdered, whereupon the emphasis shifts to how Ali might prove his innocence. He seeks Mariam's help, and in the tragedy that ensues they are both forced to confront Majid's wrath. He eventually beats Mariam to death. A triumph over censorship, this film is equally important in that it differs radically in form and content from the modern classics that make up contemporary Iran's cinematic achievement.
And so does Marziewh Meshkiny's The Day I Became A Woman, written by her husband the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. In three movements, the film tackles the long-standing theme of women in society, although it takes place in a remote town on the coast. In the first movement, a nine-year-old girl, Hava, wants to play with her friend Hassan; yet her grandmother won't let her. Informing her that, the day being her ninth birthday, she is now technically a woman, she tells her she can no longer play with boys. Since she is not quite nine yet, the girl innocently asks her grandmother to let her play with Hassan one last time. Giving her a veil with which to cover her hair, the grandmother concedes: she hands the girl a short stick, telling her that once its shadow disappears, signalling her ninth year, she must stop playing and return to the house. The stick assumes phenomenal importance in the eyes of the child. In the second movement, a young woman named Ahoo is biking with a group of women on the coast: she looks defiant. A man on horseback is trailing behind the biking crew. Ahoo's husband, he tries repeatedly to take her home but she refuses. In a tightly choreographed sequence, he seeks the support of various figures of male authority, whom he accompanies to Ahoo's location, but the girl bows finally only to the will of her brother. The third movement concerns an old, immobile rich woman who hires a group of street children to carry her all the goodies she coveted in childhood, which she now buys: furniture, electric appliances, clothes... In a comic, fantastical mould, the woman then directs the children to arrange all that she has bought on the beach, where she awaits the boat and declares to two of the girls who were biking that she has always been satisfying other men's wishes and mentions Ahoo in the process. As the boat departs, the camera reveals the little girl Hava waving to the old woman; the cycle is thus complete.
The works of the Makhmalbafs and Kiarostami may have given viewers a narrow perspective on Iranian cinema, and films like the aforementioned are to be welcomed because they act to broaden and enrich what is known about Iranian cinema. Samira Makhmalbaf has said that the films with which Iranian theatres are filled are usually commercial action, comedy or, increasingly melodramatic features. Art films like her own work have no way of reaching a wider audience. Nothing will change, Makhmalbaf says, unless the film industry's marketing mechanisms develop. By the same token, nothing in the Cairo Festival will change until the actual screenings are properly monitored.
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