Hani Mustafa traces themes of identity in this year's Cairo International Film Festival Film festivals are in essence an opportunity to view a large cross-section of fare from a variety of different cultures. They make it possible to enjoy film away from the strictures of the mainstream, which floods film theatres for most of the year. As one of the most prestigious events in the Arab world, the Cairo International Film Festival offers the viewer with an interest in Arab cinema an annual opportunity to catch up with the most significant work of Arab filmmakers, whether those living in their own countries or those based in the West. Notable this year is that a sizable portion of each programme was made up of films by Arab directors based abroad. This no doubt has an obvious effect on their work, with the most important theme concerned with the Arab "I" in contact with the Western Other: a day-to-day issue nonetheless embodied on a much larger scale in Arab-Western relations at large, since political and cultural issues are interconnected throughout the world. This dialectical relation nonetheless must affect Arab expatriates more directly, which facilitates its turning from an intellectual concern into an actual film subject -- something no doubt more pronounced after the spread of post-9/11 Islamophobia. In the American-Palestinian filmmaker Cherien Dabis's Amreeka (the Arabic mispronunciation of America), which features in the festival's Arab competition, the director explores this confused and painful relation between the "I" and the Other. The film opens with a presentation of the daily suffering of a middle-class Palestinian woman, Mona, who, working at a bank in a seemingly generic West Bank city, must pick up her son Fadi from school, then cross an Israeli checkpoint through the Wall to her house in Bethlehem -- a trial the director-screenwriter depicts twice in the course of the film, repeating the words she must say to the Israeli soldier every time. Yet it is not this issue that Dabis concentrates on -- for the film only really starts once Mona and her son obtain an immigration visa to the United States, where she rejoins her sister Raghda and Raghda's husband Nabil, a doctor, and their three daughters in Illinois. Dabis takes a cultural rather than religious position on Arab-Western relations, for the Palestinian family happens to be Christian. This becomes particularly clear when Raghda admonishes her eldest daughter after finding out that she went out with her boyfriend James, reminding her that so long as she lives with her parents, she should consider herself to be in Palestine. The drama centres on the position of Arabs in the US after 9/11, when to many Americans an Arab is a terrorist before he is even suspect: this is driven home when Nabil's patients begin to withdraw from his clinic to other doctors, and Fadi (now nicknamed Osama) begins to suffer verbal and physical abuse at school. Even James has his windshield marked with the letters KADA, which Fadi spontaneously corrects to QAEDA. Raghda and Nabil's marriage is strained, which drives Mona to seek employment as soon as possible -- but she only finds a job at a burger joint, and keeps her job secret in order not embarrass herself with the family (who might regard such a job as demeaning). On the other hand, the school principal Novotsky sympathises with Fadi to the point of bailing him out of custody when he attacks one of his colleagues after that colleague humiliates his mother at the restaurant where she works. Mona and Novotsky, who turns out to be of Polish Jewish stock, take a liking to each other -- a development explained by Mona's statement to him that she too feels like she is "minority here and minority there". There is little dramatic or aesthetic depth to Amreeka, which nonetheless manages through extreme simplicity to suggest inter-cultural possibilities of much promise: the film ends with the entire family together with Novotsky dancing at an Arab restaurant in Illinois. Except for the heroine, whose performance seems forced during some early scenes and whose acting in general is not entirely too-notch, the acting in Amreeka is all together excellent, with effortless performances conveying situations simply and beautifully. The Algerian-French director Rachid Bouchareb has managed lately to present a distinct vision of the strained connection between Algerians and their French colonisers. Yet this is not the usual depiction of the Algerian resistance. Bouchareb depicts, rather, Vichy France and the French resistance. In Indigènes, in which five of the actors received acting prizes at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, documents the work of the African corps who went to Europe to defend France against the Nazis. The film, which features in the Tributes programme, is a remarkable war film demonstrating excellent technique in the depiction of battles. But this is not its only strength. The strength of the film rests, rather, on the psychological drama unfolding within the Algerians who feel they are defending their second homeland, Europe, and European citizens who appreciate their heroism. The film is ultimately a sort of historical rapprochement between peoples, or rather a reminder of the Arabs' and Africans' contribution to saving Europe in the 20th century and thus upholding values of democracy and freedom to which they should have equal access. Bouchareb participates in the same programme with the 2009 film London River, for which the Malian actor Sotigui Kouyaté received the best actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The film is a variation on the same theme of the "I" and the Other, this time represented respectively by the Muslim African and the provincial Englishmen -- and centred around the July 2005 London bombings. The film opens with a woman named Elisabeth (Brenda Blethyn) working the fields in the English provinces. On hearing of the bombings she quickly contacts her daughter Jane, who lives and studies in London, only to discover the daughter has disappeared. We find out that this woman, a widow, has no human connections apart from her daughter and her brother Edward, whom she sometimes speaks to on the phone. On moving to London Elisabeth discovers the Arab neighbourhood where her daughter lives, during which scenes the actress manages to communicate feelings of alienation and fear -- as if she is asking whether she is still in the capital of Great Britain, whether her daughter's neighbour is one of those madmen who blow up buses and buildings -- all is clear on Elisabeth's face. Together with the actors, the filmmaker manages to say everything without words. Then the script moves onto a thin, tall black man, Osman (Sotigui Kouyaté) who has just arrived in London from France (where he lives) to look for his son Ali, also lost since the bombings, whom he has not seen for the last 15 years. Osman eventually locates a picture of Ali sitting in Arabic class next to a white colleague who is also lost, and so he rings the number attached and makes the acquaintance of Elisabeth. The device of the coincidence is not forced but rather gradually constructed in the script -- since Ali turns out to be Jane's boyfriend. Coincidences thus become a central dramatic driving force: every time Elisabeth goes somewhere in the hope of finding out about her daughter, she bumps into Osman. At first she suspects Osman of something or other and calls the police, but he is released once the investigator finds out his son is lost too. The climax occurs when, complaining of the price of the hotel where he is staying, Osman is invited to stay with Elisabeth -- and the film ends when the two discover that both their children were killed in the explosion of a bus. The film lacks lyricism which one might have expected in this type of story -- but it is all the more powerful for that. Despite overacting in some scenes on the part of Blethyn, the film relies on the power of excellent acting: Kouyaté's performance was effortlessly stunning throughout. It is clear that Bouchareb is able to present a moving and distinctive work whether on a large or a small budget, whether his subject is war or the static search for a lost child. In the last three decades, Tunisian cinema offered many visually compelling and bold films -- especially where women are concerned -- depicting, for example, hair- removal sessions, a normally woman-only affair, in Férid Boughedir's Asfour Sath. Such scenes became almost a staple of Tunisian cinema, as if the exotic details of women's conflict with tradition were the gateway of Tunisian film to international status. Yet it is through the depth of a given film that the viewer sees the difference between true art and cheap pandering to exotic tastes. Raja Amari's Buried Secrets, which features in the Arab competition, is full of such surface exoticism clearly intended to enchant the Western viewer. The film deals with a small family of a mother (Wassila Dari) and two daughters squatting in the servants' quarters of an old and nearly abandoned palace in a remote place. The opening scenes document the primitive life led by that family, the planting of the vegetables the mother cooks in the backyard of the palace, for example. The drama begins for real once the palace's heir (Dhaffer L'Abidine) arrives with his girlfriend Aelma (Rim Al-Benna). At the start the film seems to echo the atmosphere of Alejandro Amenàbar's 2001 The Others, with the youngest daughter Aicha (Hafsia Herzi) spying on the two lovers without anyone sensing her presence -- exactly like a ghost. The young heir gives a party which Aicha sneaks into, completely infatuated with all she sees. Caught out, she is pursued by a number of people, but disappears into the palace -- never to be seen again that night. The film frequently switches genres, moving from Others -like horror to the thriller when the family, caught out by Aelma, abduct and detain her for a long time -- thwarting her attempts to escape. Eventually she grows accustomed to living with them, especially when, through the same spying technique, she discovers her boyfriend cheating on her. At a loss what to do, the fate of Aelma is tied to that of the family. And her dialogues with the daughters reveal all manner of secrets: the relationship of the eldest daughter Radia (Sondos Belhassen) with a man who gave her a child, only to abandon her (the child later died); the mental disorder from which the youngest daughter suffers... Predictable at times, the film ultimately gives the impression that its maker had no idea where the drama was going, and finally ended it arbitrarily with a series of murders that only Aicha survives. Bold and exotic scenes abound, and one has the impression that it is these scenes, not altogether dramatically justified, that the director is concerned with: Aicha trying to shave the hair on her legs, only to be admonished by her mother; the mother parting Aicha's legs to find out if she had had sex on her return from the party; Radia masturbating in the bathroom; Radia bathing Aelma. In the end Amari seems to bolster up Western stereotypes of the Arab world in hopes of some level of success, but she does little else.
