Brave new screen

At the Second Arab Independent Screen Festival in Doha, Hani Mustafa speaks to Samira Makhmalbaf, award winning Iranian film-maker and a member of the festival jury
The second Independent Arab Screen Festival in Doha, Qatar, which closed last Friday with Syrian film-maker Mohamed Malas's newly unearthed 1974 Moscow Cinema Institute graduation film, Al-Kul fi Makanuh, wa Kul Shayi ala ma Yuram Sayedi Al-Dabit (Everything is in Place, and All is Well, Officer Sir) was more of a forum for young film-makers than a popular cinematic event. The adjunct "independent," as the director and founder of the festival, Mohamed Makhlouf, explained in response to critics, does not imply that the scope of festival fare is restricted to films produced by official or academic bodies or directed exclusively at specialists. Ideally, in fact, "independent cinema comprises films in whose making government institutions do not meddle, particularly from the point of view of censorship." The object of the festival, rather, is to cater to art that seeks freedom from any such bind. "We accept some films produced by official or semi-official institutions, whose approach fits in with this orientation."
A Libyan journalist living in Europe, Makhlouf had initially conceived the festival in response to Western media celebrations of Israel's 50th birthday: how, he wondered, might Arabs too stake out media territory in the West? Obtaining the support of Al-Jazira Satellite Television, Makhlouf presided over the first round in London, in 1999. And the festival has since reflected a particular concern with the Palestinian issue. For the opening this year, Makhlouf orchestrated Bayan Basari (A Visual Statement), a collection of six cinematic episodes on the Palestinian issue by six Arab film-makers (Hisham Zaouqi, Nassim Abbasi, Fouad Elywan, Saad Hindawi, Samir Zidan and Nizar Hassan), most of which included only footage of historical events, edited by the various film-makers.
The 1948 Arab film-maker Nizar Hassan's record of his attempt to bring Palestinian film-makers together to make a contribution to "A Visual Statement" is one notable exception. His episode, "Challenge," depicted the film-makers' fumbling attempts to by-pass Israeli security simply to meet (the directors in question live variously in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel). Their failure to do so is turned into a cinematic success as Hassan poignantly and humourously follows them on their quest.
Palestinian fare also included Rola Mansour's hagiographic Laila: Shajarat Al-Burtuqal (Laila: the Orange Tree), a disappointing film depicting a series of meetings in which Palestinian fidaieen (guerrillas of the resistance) talk about the celebrated freedom fighter Laila Khalid. A seminar was held to discuss Palestinian film production, attended by Hassan, Tawfiq Abu Wael and the veteran actor Mohamed Bakri, who performed a compelling monodrama based on the late writer Emil Habibi's classic novel Al-Mutashael (a performance Bakri presented at the Cairo Experimental Theatre Festival last year). Bakri screened a film he directed, 1948, a record of the memories of a group of elderly Arabs, in which he employed poems by the Palestinian resistance poet par excellence, Mahmoud Darwish, sung by Bakri's teenage daughter, Yafa. A special film programme, too, showed 10 Arab-made films about the Palestinian issue.
Egyptian cinema also had its fair share of exposure. In the context of a special programme entitled "Voices from Egypt," 11 Egyptian films were screened. Three Egypt-centred seminars discussed a classic film restoration project (the as-yet-vague outlines of which were presented by Sayed Badriya, an Egyptian cinema enthusiast and sometime actor living in the US), an independent film-makers' Web site project (presented by the young film-maker Ahmed Atef) and the current crisis of documentaries and short films in Egypt (attended by the young film-makers Ahmed Maher, Sherif El-Azma and Ahmed Rashwan). Although arguably more interesting than commercial long narrative features, these films have neither reliable funding nor screening venues -- and thus, a not particularly bright future. Egypt also gleaned several of the festival's awards: Alamat Ibril (April Signs) won both the best director (Maher) and best editing (Khalid Marie) awards; Sherif El-Azma's video documentary Dunia-Qamar, an audio-visual comparison between one modern pop and one sha'bi singer, received special mention from the jury.
Of the other Arab countries participating in the festival, Lebanon showcased the work of a number of young film-makers under the auspices of the Shams programme (directed by the theatre director Roger Assaf and the young film-maker Elian Al-Rahib), while Iraqi film-makers presented their latest works in the context of a special programme entitled "Films Under Siege." Two other programmes -- "An Arab Panorama" and "Banned Arab Films" -- offered an even wider perspective on the dynamics of film-making in the Arab World, both past and present.
Of the jury members -- Iranian film-maker Samira Makhmalbaf, Egyptian film-maker Saad Hindawi, Lebanese film critic Rima Al-Mismar, Qatari artist Mohamed Ali Abdalla, Jordanian film-maker Ghada Saba and Moroccan film-maker Nassim Abbasi -- only the Palestinian film-maker Rashid Mashharawi and the veteran Syrian director Nabil Al-Malih (the official head of the jury) cannot be described as young. The vitality and objectivity this gave rise to made the festival particularly engaging, but against the backdrop of Qatar society, where film theatres are few and far between and viewers generally prefer home-videos of commercial features to the practice of cinema-going, one could not avoid the impression that the Independent Arab Screen Festival was ultimately a private get-together of the young and the independent. Insofar as it set out to perform this function, however, the Doha festival was remarkably successful. Let there be many more such Arab events.
As she rose to receive the jury prize for Blackboard at Cannes last year the audience might have been forgiven their surprise. How, after all, could it have come to pass that this 20-year-old Iranian woman had won one of the most coveted awards in international cinema?
Samira Makhmalbaf is, though, but the latest representative of a national cinema that has a long and distinguished history. It may only have come to the attention of international audiences in the last decade -- since Abbas Kirostami won the Palme d'or at Cannes in 1997 for Taste of Cherries it seems that no film festival can end without one Iranian director or another walking off with a prize -- but this sudden flurry of international interest should not obscure the fact that film-making in Iran has a century long history. It began when Shah Muzaffar Al-Din returned in 1900 from France, determined to introduce the new invention to his country. By the end of Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi's reign, though, the situation looked bleak, with the wholesale imprisonment of intellectuals and artists, including Samira's father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, whose championing of human rights led to his imprisonment before the Islamic Revolution.
Samira seems to have inherited many of her father's qualities. She was very close to him as a child, and insists that she learned cinema at home. She acted in her father's films and worked as his assistant director while he helped in writing the scenario and editing her film, Blackboard.
Following the rise of Iranian cinema to prominence in the international arena many thought, Makhmalbaf says, "that it represented a new wave. The simple truth, though, is that the new films that came out of Iran are poetic. And this is not surprising, given that Iranian culture aspires to the poetic model."
The claustrophobic political situation, Makhmalbaf believes, has had a positive influence on Iranian film-making.
"When life is hard," she says, "you need energy to express. And it is like finding life in a graveyard, or light in pitch darkness. It's really something."
It is this poetic quality that is most apparent in Makhmalbaf's Blackboard as well as in The Apple. The former deals with the trials and tribulations of a group of teachers carrying their blackboards through a mountainous region in Kurdistan, in search of children with a desire for knowledge and learning, while The Apple tells the story of a religious extremist who, fearing for the well-being of his twin daughters and blind wife, locks them in the house for 11 years. In one scene the mother leaves the house. A child is in the street, playing with an apple, and he gives it to her to cheer her up. According to Makhmalbaf the child is an almost mythical figure, God and the devil combined.
The Apple was based on a true story, and Makhmalbaf was able to convince the real life protagonists to act in the film. It is an aspect of her film-making that has led many critics to press comparisons with the Dogma 95 wave, comparisons Makhmalbaf is keen to squash.
When she began making films, she insists, "I did not know what Dogma 95 films were. I was told that they involve work with real people and yes, I work with real people. And though I understand that they want to break a cliché, they have wound up building other clichés. For example, you have to keep the camera moving all the time. Why?"
No one can deny that political factors come into play in the giving of awards. Yet in the end it is the artistic integrity of any given film that is the key to its success.
Some Iranian directors -- Jafar Panahi is the most obvious example -- go out of their way to communicate with the audience in as direct a way as possible, to the extent that the film becomes, almost, a report.
"Actually, I might like to see a film that is made like this," says Makhmalbaf, "but when I shoot or make a film I follow a different approach. I do not make this kind of movie because it is, in the end, just for today. But what about tomorrow? . Films that are explicitly political, that try to be 'objective reporting', often miss the point. There are written laws, and there are traditions, unspoken customs. If you want to make a film like The Apple, you cannot just say that the father did so and so. You have to know why he locked his children in the house for 11 years. And you will find that he loves his children."
Despite the high profile of Iranian cinema in recent years, film-makers continue to face many problems, not least financing. The government, Makhmalbaf points out, finances only propaganda films. Other films, which cost less -- averaging $100,000 dollars, half of which is spent on film stock -- wind up being joint productions.
"Co-production," Makhmalbaf elaborates, "means co-financing -- and most of the time with Europe. It was really hard to find funding for my first film. But then a foreign producer funded the film after seeing the rushes. Funding for my second film was easier to come by. All independent film-makers face this problem."
Having found funding, the next problem facing any film-maker is getting the censor's approval. Makhmalbaf believes that, in this respect, things have improved a bit under Khatami.
Having passed through the censor, the third problem is to attract an audience that on the whole prefers commercial action films. The local audience for art house films is not big enough to justify the industry, which is not, Makhmalbaf points out, a situation unique to Iran. There is no one country that can furnish a sufficient audience for art films, which is why such films must have international distribution. They need to travel all around the world, to gather an audience here and there."
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