Magdi Ahmed Ali: In love with the ordinary

Magdi Ahmed Ali:
In love with the ordinary
Movies so real they hurt
Profile by Nadia Abou El-Magd
EVERYDAY PEOPLE: from top, Asrar Al-Banat; Ya Dunia Ya Gharami; Al-Batal, behind the scenes; Al-Batal; Asrar Al-Banat
"The beginning of Asrar Al-Banat is one of the most powerful in the history of Egyptian cinema," writes cinema critic Essam Zakariya. The scene in question shows a 16-year-old dripping with blood and sweat as she gives birth alone in a bathroom.
Magdi Ahmed Ali has nothing against shocking audiences when it comes to addressing taboos, and his latest movie is no exception. The topic: premarital sex among adolescents. Ali says it is based on a real story.
The opening credits of Asrar Al-Banat (Girls' Secrets) are preceded by shots of a girl, growing from infancy to childhood and young adolescence. A voice-over speaks the traditional difficult questions: "Where did we come from?" "Why did God create us?" Her bewildered parents reply: "When you grow up you will find out," or "Why do you ask so many questions?"
Yasmine, the heroine, manages to hide her pregnancy from her family, but cannot hide the birth. While she is still unconscious after the delivery, a doctor excises her, explaining that the mutilation "will help her control herself next time."
Her father, ashamed, briefly considers killing the baby by cutting off the oxygen supply to its incubator. Instead, he tracks down the father, Shadi, a teen-age neighbour who is forced to marry Yasmine. When the baby dies, he is forced to divorce her.
In the last scene, Yasmine, clad in white, is lying in a bed like a coffin; her father decides to bury her alive, and sets to work barring the exits to the apartment.
Between the shock of giving birth and the baby's death towards the end, many secrets, especially the secrets and dilemmas of the middle class, are exposed, gently but uncompromisingly.
The suffering of the middle class in Egypt is usually the backdrop to Ali's movies.
"When I know other classes, I'll talk about them," he says, sitting in his office in a tower block overlooking the Nile in Maadi. "These are the people I know: they look like me, I like them," he continues passionately.
Ali is huge, and he talks like a philosopher. "I'm not blindly in love with this class," he cautions; "I'm recording its demise."
He once said, and still believes, that "this is the age of stolen dreams, both mundane and impossible. Marriage, having a car, cappuccino: who killed those dreams?" The problem, he adds, is that "the middle class is collapsing. It is bombarded with all these advertisements, but is deprived of the means of affording them. There is no way out but violence."
Ali's father died when he was nine, and the family migrated from Mansoura to Cairo. "The man" of his family and a smart student, he knew his dream of entering the Cinema Institute had become impossible overnight.
To please his mother, he studied pharmacology. When he graduated, he worked at a pharmacy at night, went on army duty in the morning, and attended classes at the Cinema Institute when he had time.
Ali participated in the 1972 student demonstrations, and then went into hiding to escape arrest. As a result, he graduated a year late, leaving the institute in his third year and traveling to Saudi Arabia, in an attempt to scrape together enough cash to marry his sweetheart. She chose a wealthier bridegroom.
"There are a lot of failed experiences in my life; the most important is the marriage of the woman I loved. It influenced me deeply. This was the first big failure of my life, it was -- and deep in my heart still is -- beyond my comprehension. I discovered that life is not always to be understood. As much as I like logic, I guess it doesn't always apply to women." He grins. "But that's what women say about men," I interrupt. "Really? Thanks!" he says with a big laugh. That is exceptional, as Ali is a very serious man.
His failure to understand women always doesn't prevent him from sympathising with them, however. "Magdi Ahmed Ali is the bravest when addressing women's issues in his movies," comments critic Ali Abu Shadi. "He handles the human body with respect."
Ali thinks for a second. "This may be because of my mother, who struggled for us, or the women I fell in love with. I met a lot of bad women, but they weren't evil."
After another brief pause, he adds: "You could say that I make movies about women, but they are not women's movies, they are movies about the oppressed in society. Women are just the most oppressed in our society."
So Ya Dunia Ya Gharami (The World, My Love) and Asrar Al-Banat are not just women having to delay marriage for years, or the importance attributed to virginity: they are "ambitious movies that deal with broader social issues like religious extremism, unemployment, double standards, the middle class's identity crisis..." He said.
Ya Dunia Ya Gharami (1996) tells the story of three working-class Cairo women in their 30s, dealing with their hard lives and dreaming of marriage. Ali's first movie, it was a huge success, gleaning 22 awards, many international.
"Even now, I still don't know what was so special about that movie. Everyone liked it, and they liked Asrar Al-Banat too. My favourite is Al-Batal (The Hero), because it is the least lucky," Ali muses. He describes his first and third works as "too simple, in the negative sense of the word."
Ali is still amazed at the reactions his films elicit. "When people cry at one of my movies, I'm amazed. What I like most is mixing sadness and humour: the ability to move the audience from sorrow to laughter, charged with emotions... Art can bring out emotions never expected or imagined."
Where does he get all this sadness?
"I call it noble melancholy. Tolstoy defines art as contagious noble feelings; if I can make the audience cry or laugh, I feel proud of being a real artist, that is more important to me than any criticism."
Again, Ali offers a class explanation for his propensity to gloom: "Our generation, the 70s generation, experienced a lot of sadness and defeat, on the human and political level. But this also results in a great appetite for life." In the final scene of Ya Dunia Ya Gharami, the three friends say: "We must live, whether by gentle means or by force."
Although he tackles such controversial issues, Ali has not had problems with the censor or the audience, not because of self-censorship, but because "although we are a conservative society, it is easier to address sexual than political or religious taboos."
He adds sternly: "I don't want to shock, provoke or pat on the back."
Back to The Hero (1998), his personal favourite but the one that received the least audience acclaim. It is about three friends living in Alexandria during the 1919 Revolution; the hero of the title, a boxer, constantly sends letters to popular leader Saad Zaghlul.
At a private screening of this movie, Ali was very tense. He sat alone in a corner, smoking one cigarette after another. "I don't believe I did all this," he told me after the movie, still overwrought.
"The hero in this movie is not just a person who wants to be a hero; he is a hero searching for an identity," explains Ali. The movie, in his words, addresses the heroism of illusion or the illusion of heroism. "I asked existential questions in light of a nation in crisis which was searching for its identity at the beginning of last century. A century later we are still asking the same questions."
Critic Mustafa Darwish believes people were not interested in watching it because news had spread that it was a serious film. Ali has no regrets, though. "I knew it wouldn't be a great success, but I want to make different types of movies." He believes that this one will be rediscovered in time.
So what is real heroism? "I think that the heroism of the past is over, that of the all-knowing and charismatic hero. The real heroes are people in the street, the poor, for whom every day is a struggle for survival. Those who don't know they are heroes will always be my real heroes."
Before making movies himself, Ali worked as assistant director and scriptwriter for 10 years. Aged 49, he is very sad "that a lot of time has been wasted. Sometimes I even wish I'd made worse movies, but more of them... I'm trying, I want to say a lot of things before I go."
He is currently working on serialising a screenplay for Egyptian TV about social and economic conditions in the industrial city of Al-Mahalla Al-Kubra in 1921, when the first textile factory was built there. He showed the script, titled Al-Balad (The Country) to Soad Hosni almost 10 years ago. She liked it, but after the failure of her penultimate movie, Al-Daraga Al-Thaltha (Third Class) was unable to find a producer willing to risk making it.
Ali's fourth movie, on which he is currently working, is based on a novel by Ibrahim Aslan titled Asafir Al- Nil (Nile Birds). "It is a very important movie, the first I have made based on a novel. I hope I will succeed, because I'm in love with it," he says enthusiastically. It is about the ruralisation of the city and the urbanisation of the village, and a young man who migrates from his village to Cairo, ending up in Imbaba. It is another journey into the development of the middle class since the 1940s. It is also a narrative on life and death. "What I think I have in common with Aslan is that all of our characters are beautiful."
Ali's characters make mistakes, but they are normal -- neither angels nor devils. That is why audiences sympathise with Yasmine in Asrar Al- Banat, and with Sekina, who loses her virginity, in Ya Dunia Ya Gharami.
"The drama of the normal is very difficult. I don't know if I'll manage to make drama like that for the rest of my life." As he speaks, Magdi Ahmed Ali's eyes seem about to overflow. Then he looks away, and it's all over.
main photo: Randa Shaath
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