Back from Abu Dhabi, Hani Mustafa recounts miracles of restoration Among the highlights of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival this year is the restored films section in which Shadi Abdel-Salam's classic was screened: the Middle East premiere of the newly restored 35 mm version, which was screened in Cannes this year. The film was restored by the Martin Scorcese Foundation in collaboration with the National Centre of Film. Abdel-Salam's Mummy, as it is better known in Arabic, is among the most important works in the history of the Egyptian film industry. Benefitting from his experience as a set and costume designer - for many years Egypt's best - the director made an art object in moving pictures, exemplary in framing and colour. Yet in previous versions of the film the colours were faded to the point of being almost black- and-white. Having seen the film so many times I was reluctant to attend the screening of the new version until I heard this it would be 98 percent identical to the 1969 original, set in Luxor in 1881, one year before the British occupation of Egypt. Nor did the profound philosophical debate conveyed through dialogue and acting date for me, after all. The moral dilemma that besets the film's protagonist Wanis (Ahmad Marie), the recently bereaved son of the chief of the Huroubat tribe, when he discovers that his family's income has come from plundering ancient graves and selling the monuments to a middle-man named Ayoub (Shafik Noureddin) - an existential crisis linked to the arrival of an antiquities expedition from Cairo which puts an end to the illegal trade - remains compulsive on every viewing. What changed to an astounding degree was the colour. I saw the film as if I had never seen all those visual details before. I had imagined, for example, that the robes of Wanis's uncles (Abdelazim Abdelhaqq and Abdelmoneim Abulfetouh) were black, visual evidence of the tribe's conservatism. As it turns out the sleeves have a band of dark blue that, regardless of what symbolism these robes might have, gives them an astounding aesthetic power. Likewise the beautiful girl Wanis seems to fall for (Nadia Lotfi): her dress, which appeared wholly black, has violet and orange shades. Ayoub's Shylock-like demeanour becomes more apparent once we discover the range of hues in his outfit. Such clarity of colour no doubt has implications for the meaning and aesthetics of the film; it drove me to think that Abdel-Salam's static frame, in drawing on ancient Egyptian murals, does not see them as faded or unchanging but rather includes, beyond the muted drama of the action, a visual dynamism hitherto hidden from the viewer. Another successfully restored film was Metropolis, directed by the Austrian-American pioneer Fritz Lang in 1927. A silent, black-and-white film, Metropolis is widely regarded as the first ever science-fiction movie. A 16 mm version which includes many scenes omitted from the original was discovered in Buenos Aires in 2008, but it required much restoration before it could be viewable; its premiere, accompanied by a full orchestra, was screened at the Berlin Festival last February. Metropolis is a vision of a modern city of 2000, reflecting Lang's ideas about the future. The action takes place in this city where life is divided between the owner of the city and his clique - including a drunkard son - who live above ground, and the workers whose lives are restricted to underground quarters in which they move between the factory and the house deprived of sun and air. The life of the workers is depicted in expressive dance, with a sharp distinction drawn between those beginning a shift and those coming out of one. Constrasting the workers with the owner's son, whose continuous Bacchic revelry makes it seem as though he lives in paradise, Lang critiques capitalism in his own way. *** This year the festival collaborated with the MOMA to organise a special section entitled Mapping Subjectivity, which included two films by Elia Suleiman: Chronicles of A Disappearance and Divine Intervention, which won the Venice Film Festival Horizons award in 1992 and the Cannes Film Festival's jury prize in 2002, respectively. Together with The Time that Remains, which won the Best Middle East Film award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival last year, they constitute a unique experimental cinematic language. Motion is largely restricted to motion within a static frame, and it is often slow and repetitive. The simplicity, naturalism and sheer humour - as in the father insulting everyone he comes across during the opening scenes of Divine Intervention, or the nihilism of the group of friends in the other two films - marks Suleiman's immediate and unique appeal. In the three films Suleiman creates a comic picture of the relations between the neighbours in a particular quarter of Nazareth, which are all the more interesting for being similar to those one might register in any neighbourhood across the Arab world. Perhaps this is part of the director's intention - to show the world just how Arab Nazareth is despite being part of Israel since 1948 (Suleiman himself is an Arab Israeli). The politics of Suleiman's films, while seemingly very straightforward, are in fact extremely layered and complex. In Chronicle of a Disappearance, for example, the Arab girl looking for a flat in Jerusalem - supposedly an Israeli citizen - uses a phone booth to dial the numbers of those who are advertising their flats for rent: she is speaking Hebrew, and her interlocutors either put down the phone once they figure out her accent or they fail to take into account the possibility of such an Arab girl existing. The power of Suleiman's films is how they bring the reality of racism, for example, into the most mundane aspects of existence. In Chronicle of Disappearance the action coincides with the 1993 Oslo Accords, resulting in a state of confusion, with renewed hope but little results on the ground. In Divine Intervention the situation is far more confrontational, with the second Intifada having occurred and the general feeling one of conflict, with all the Palestinian territories returned to the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s now closed off. In the film the Arab Israeli hero (played by Suleiman himself) is in love with a girl from Ramallah, complicating the process of their meeting. Still, political humour continues, with the girl turning into a ninja in order to meet her lover or an apricot pit thrown at a tank instantly destroying it. No doubt Suleiman's films are on the far side not only of mainstream Arab cinema - where he is not as appreciated as he might be both because of the highly developed structure of his films and because of ideological attitudes towards Arab Israelis - but also of reality and cinematic reality the world over. They recall Charlie Chaplin or Nanni Moretti's Cara Diario.
