Hani Mustafa reviews three of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival's more interesting films While memory remains important in history writing, historians depend on it far less in their undoubtedly difficult business than documentation. Yet in ancient times, when history books reflected the will of those who commissioned them, not only memory but fantasy played a central role in the genre. It seems such tumultuous upheavals and wars proved particularly disturbing to Chinese filmmaker Chuan Lu when he made The Last Supper, which was screened in the Abu Dhabi Film Festival official competition: it deals with this overlap between documentation and historical fact. The film deals with an episode of Chinese history between the end of the second and the beginning of the third century BC: the end of the rule of the Qin and the beginning of that of the Han dynasty. The film deals with the details of the rise of Emperor Liu Bang (Ye Liu) to power -- a common man who joins the army of one of the breakaway generals with a group of his friends -- who is said to be descended from a dragon, not a human being, which is also demonstrated in the scene in which, talking about himself and his ability to a group of warriors, it begins to rain heavily as if to demonstrate the veracity of his supernatural powers: neither Bang nor Lu himself endorse this idea, however; the latter says it is a rumour, indicating that it is nonetheless useful. From the start of the film Lu has the ambition to be king, something the director-screenwriter spells out at various points in the adage that kings are not born but made. It is the emperor's paranoia, however, that underlies the dramatic structure of the film. Lu is suspicious of many comrades who help him rise to power, and he has them killed one after the other. This is in fact how the film starts, in BC 195, when Emperor Lu Bang, while on his deathbed suffering nightmares and hallucinations, is presented with the head of one of his loyal army leaders. In the last scenes of the film it becomes clear that Bang's wife has been an important element in his paranoia. The script uses the emperor's disjointed, muddled memory to present this important episode of ancient Chinese history as if it is made up of a collage of disparate documents, especially as we see the court historians documenting parts of the story on planks of wood as the action proceeds -- something that is occasionally reflected in actual scenes of the film. In one confrontation between the empress and one of the emperor's friends she shows the man the planks devoted to him empty of writing, indicating that they will be filled only on his death. The banquet in which Bang survives an attempt on his life is presented from several different viewpoints, inviting the viewer to be sceptical regarding the truth of events. With remarkable photography, costume design and scenography, the dense, rich narrative keeps the viewer perplexed, forcing some degree of reconstruction of the temporal order of the story. *** Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín's No -- another official competition entry -- couples the same kind of cinematic interest with a huge leap into the future. It deals with the few months preceding the referendum on Augusto Pinochet staying in power, which would eventually lead to the end of dictatorial rule in Chile, a redrafting of the constitution, parliamentary and presidential elections. The film deals with the campaign that brought together many oppositional parties against the Pinochet regime, including Christian democrats, socialist and radical parties. Filmed more or less wholly as if it were a video, to give the impression of a 1980s television screen, the film conveys events from the viewpoint of the protagonist René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), a young man who works in an advertising company and first appears presenting a carbonated beverage called Free in such a manner as to show how exciting and beautiful life is drinking it. In many ways the film is a trip back to the 1980s -- down to the argument between the old-guard left-wing views of older activists and their younger comrades, like Saavedra. Older politicals want to stage a campaign exposing Pinochet's abuses since his coup against the democratically elected leader Salvador Allende, showing assassinations, kidnappings and torture; but Saavedra's idea is to stage a consumer-style advertising campaign entitled "No", which presents Pinochet as the obstacle in the way of the kind of cheerful, happy life shown in product advertisements -- without playing on the bloodshed and human rights abuses perpetrated by the dictator. The film does register the conflict between the resulting "No" campaign and the "Yes" campaign staged against it, depicting the violence of the latter, but its focus remains on the argument between older and younger politicals, with the latter group eager to convert as large a proportion as possible of the apathetic "silent majority" to the cause of voting no. The film manages to incorporate a human dimension, however, with Saavedra's marital issues as the father of a small child and a husband whose wife, being a political activist herself, not only is very frequently arrested activist but has a lover as well... *** Sometimes documentation takes on a more humane colour even as it narrates otherwise dry historical events. It then becomes clear that even human details seldom lack a political dimension, which may have been the aim of the Egyptian director Wael Amr and the French-Lebanese director Philippe Dibb in their documentary In Search of Oil and Sand, screened in the documentary competition at the festival. It relies on a unique coincidence in the life of the main character, Mahmoud Thabit -- the son of Adel Thabit, one of King Farouk I's closest friends -- who on returning to his father's house in Egypt discovers 16mm film rolls containing a fictional film called Oil and Sand, in which the actors are members of the royal family, their aristocratic and (American and British) diplomat friends, including Farouk's sister Princess Faiza and her husband Bülent Raouf -- himself a grandchild of Khedive Ismail's -- who wrote and directed the film. Filmed some two months before the outbreak of the July Revolution of 1952, the short feature seems at first sight to be an adventure classic. It is shot between a vacation residence in Sakkara used on weekends by Princess Faiza, and the surrounding desert; and it tells the story of an Arab king facing a coup staged by a relation of his who studied military science abroad: Britain intervenes on behalf of the reigning king, and America intervenes on behalf of the upstart. The brilliance of the two directors is that they do not spend too much time on the film within the film, showing only a few scenes. They concentrate rather on the lives of its aristocratic makers, their emotions and the way they lived prior to the July Revolution: the life of Princess Nevine, for example, the daughter of Prince Abbas Halim, who plays the role of the kidnapped king's daughter. Yet it does not miss the opportunity to draw the connection between the theme of the film and what is happening in the reality surrounding its making -- down to the hint at the connection between the American ambassador Jefferson Caffery and the Free Officers who staged the revolution. It also deals with the life of the family of Mahmoud Thabit, only a child at the time of the revolution and the house arrest of the royal family that followed, including the well-known case in which his father was charged with espionage and eventually acquitted. Through these dialogues, journals and other historical source material, the two directors manage to portray a full picture of the social life and financial pressures in the lives of the royal family in exile and, especially, their feelings regarding political developments in the 1950s and 1960s. There is little room for nostalgia in the midst of the all but overload of information. This gives the viewer room in which to think about and assess the human and historical material -- beyond basic sympathy with the Thabits or the royal family -- an achievement indeed.
