Reporting on the third round of MEIFF from Abu Dhabi, Hani Mustafa samples the Abu Dhabi-based festival's fare The first Ministry of Culture production in many, many years, Al-Musafir was the fourth Egyptian film to feature in Venice (after the 1937 Widad, directed by a non-Egyptian, Fritz Kramp, and two of the late Youssef Chahine's films: An Egyptian Tale in 1982 and the 2007 Chaos ). In Al-Musafir, a relatively long film of exceptional artistic value, Maher (who also wrote the screenplay) registers three days in the life of one perfectly ordinary Egyptian man, Hassan (Omar Sharif, who also narrates), contrasting the historical significance of the days in question with their significance for the protagonist. 1948, for example, is not the year of the Nakba but the year Hassan (Khaled El-Nabawi, at this point) experiences love for the first time in Port Said, where he is to supervise the telegraph office. Port Said is then multiethnic and fantastical: Hassan encounters a wine seller who keeps his produce in a barrel the size of a two-storey house and serves it through a series of taps and hoses while also maintaining a kind of whorehouse where services include hearing the prostitutes moan; an enormous ship docks in Port Said, a party is held on deck, and Hassan assumes the name Fouad and sneaks into the party to see the daughter of his superior, Nora (Serene Abdel-Nour), the talk of Port Said whom he has fallen in love with. Though she too has fallen in love with him, Nora does not know Hassan's name, she looks down timidly every time she encounters him at the office where her father works, and so the plot makes provisions for Hassan using an assumed name in his relationship with her. Later a violent sex scene between the two of them -- in the wake of which Nora is repelled by her "strong and bold" lover -- testifies to Maher's ability to employ cinematic techniques to narrative ends. Maher also employs symbolism: on deck, Hassan attempts to climb the mast of the ship only to fall off into the water. He nearly drowns before the real Fouad (Amr Wakid) saves him, later marrying Nora only to leave her when he realises that she has had sex with Hassan. Thus ends the first day, during which the acting is brilliant. Abdel-Nour gives no indication of the fact that this is her first film, while it would be enough to establish El-Nabawi's exceptional performance to review the scene in which he smokes a cigarette watching the wedding of the girl he loves. The second day is set in Alexandria during the October War in 1973. Once again the screenplay pays only contingent attention to the war, with nationalist songs playing in the background for example. On this day Nadia (also Abdel-Nour), the daughter of Nora and probably also of Hassan, calls Hassan and asks him to come to Alexandria after the death of her twin Ali. This day is the body of the story, with the first serving as an introduction and the third as the ending. Maher attempts through this episode to tell a story about the conflict between suspicion and certainty in which Hassan is implicated by showing up once again in the life of Nora's daughter (in the third day he will appear to Nadia's son). It is during this second day however that the melodramatic potential of the story reaches its apex, since it includes the disaster of the drowning of Hassan's alleged son Ali (who never appears), as well as the development of Hassan's feelings towards Nora, whom he sees as his first love incarnate, doubting that she is really his daughter. Maher dramatises these emotions effectively, concluding the episode with Nadia's marriage to Hassan's simpleton friend. El-Nabawi's performance during the first day was probably the best he has ever given, but during the second half it seems he was hampered by the knowledge that he was presenting a character to be resumed by Omar Sharif -- with the result that his expressiveness fluctuated somewhat. Yet his performance during the beginning of the episode, especially in the scenes where he identifies Ali's body, is still exceptional. As a whole the second day is still very powerful. Maher excels at presenting the emotions of an octogenarian (Omar Sharif) whose memory has failed him, having become devoid of all but those two days. He documents what happens to the old Hassan in the autumn of 2001, and his feelings towards little Ali (Sherif Ramzi) who works as a fire-fighting conscript, dramatising the internal conflict Hassan experiences regarding the question of whether Ali really is his grandson. Hassan accompanies Ali to hospital where the latter is to have plastic surgery to make him look more like his supposed grandfather -- only to light a cigarette and so purposely sets off the fire alarm in order to run away with his anaesthetised grandson before the surgery is performed -- a huge disappointment to Ali. Once again the acting is brilliant, with Ramzi performing beautifully. Sharif offers one of the best scenes in his career when he presents a just woken Ali with a box of cookies that he has forgotten where he has placed (even though he is holding it in his hand), and while looking for it discovers that Ali has left the house. Sharif's performance is progressively more powerful -- so much so that, by the end of the film, when the protagonist (this remarkable antihero) dies and is cinematically resuscitated in the end scene, it is hard for the viewer not to break down in tears. Edited by Tamer Ezzat and shot by Marco Anorato, the crew manage to present a beautifully slow-paced melodrama alternately humorous and moving, a very far cry from both mainstream Egyptian film and Hollywood. This is meditative and Sufi fare, reminiscent almost of Tarkovsky. *** Despite the increasing space documentary now takes up in areas traditionally reserved for the fiction film -- a trend spectacularly confirmed when Michael Moore won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or for his 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 -- many festivals, MEIFF included, still uphold the traditional classification by maintaining an official competition for documentary film. Among the more interesting screenings on the documentary official competition programme is the Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Salhab's 1958, in which he attempts to weave the historical into the personal: the year of the title is not only the time of the mini civil war that preceded the outbreak of full-scale civil war in 1975 but also the year of Salhab's birth. Yet the connection seems but a flimsy pretext for recounting an important episode in Middle East history, following the withdrawal of the British and French colonial forces in the wake of the Suez War, when it seemed as though Egypt under Gamal Abdel-Nasser was trailblazing change throughout the region. In 1958 Egypt and Syria unified, and it's the same year of the fight against Britain's Baghdad Pact. At the time the Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, who endorsed the Baghdad Pact, sought to alter the constitution in order to stay in power -- with disastrous consequences for the country, as the attempt led to a confrontation between Chamoun's government and the opposition, and it was said at the time that the confrontation was engineered by the United Arab Republic (Nasser's Egypt and Syria). The war ended with American Marine forces deployed on the shores of Lebanon to keep the peace and the election of the head of the army General Fouad Chehab to the post of president. Salhab reviews these events in a conversation with his mother who, though in the final months of her pregnancy while they occurred, as it turns out, was actually in Senegal with his father while they happened. Thus the mother's testimony is hardly at the heart of events in the film. Perhaps it was this that drove Salhab to use poetry and various sound techniques -- sometimes mixing the voices of interlocutors like his mother or an actual eyewitness who relates the same events -- in order to combine the personal with the historical. The film seemed somewhat fragmented with much superfluous material, as if the director is not always clear what he is aiming for. Salhab's mother and footage from the war are interspersed with images of the director walking the streets of Beirut and scenes of an elderly man -- apparently a retired militiaman -- putting together an automatic gun and taking it apart again. *** Mohamed Al-Daraji is one director who has made the move from documentary to fiction, but in his second (and first fiction) film Ibn Babel (Son of Babel) -- which is being screened in MEIFF's official competition -- he relies on the same techniques that characterised his debut, a documentary entitled Ahlam (Dreams) which he shot in Baghdad following the arrival of the US forces in 2003. One somewhat obvious weak point is that, rather than approaching the wide world of fiction film, Al-Daraji deals with a specifically Iraqi issue that has been tackled from the same perspective by documentaries. Ibn Babel is the story of a Kurdish 12-year-old, Ahmed, who travels with his grandmother from the Kurdish area to Nassiriyah weeks after the fall of Baghdad to look for his father, Ibrahim, who was arrested during the first Gulf War in 1991. The 600km journey ends with the death of the grandmother after she despairs of ever finding her son Ibrahim whether alive or in the newly discovered communal graves dug by Saddam Hussein for his Kurdish victims. The film offers beautifully constructed frames in the classical mould -- it is admirably shot -- yet as many critics here in Abu Dhabi have commented, it is little more than two hours of continuous wailing with little dramatic or intellectual value. The message is simple and direct: the Baath Party had victims. And through the device of a non-Kurd who proves sympathetic to the child and his grandmother on their journey, Al-Daraji seems to say, basic interpersonal compassion is enough to spread peace in Iraq. No better or deeper than the peace ads funded by the Iraqi government and routinely screened on satellite channels. Judging by the popular and official response to it, however, the film is not unlikely to receive a prize. *** The Turkish filmmaker Pelin Esmer's slowly edited 11'e 10 kala (10 to 11), on the other hand, is a remarkable instance of the shift from documentary to fiction. Esmer, who also wrote the screenplay, slowly and meticulously documents the life of an elderly gentleman named Mithat who is striving to hold onto his memory. Mithat is a compulsive collector of the strangest things including newspapers from 1950, as well as dated transcripts of phone conversations with acquaintances. The man does not seem to be lonely for longer than a few moments at a time, when he smokes a cigarette while reclining on his armchair in the middle of hills of newspapers that fill the living room. The documentary technique is an effective tool for following Mithat while he undertakes his daily rituals: buying his items, haggling with the sellers in his extremely quiet way. Yet the dramatic shift in the film is stormy. By the time the owners of Mithat's flat resolve to evacuate the building and rebuild it, especially since it requires maintenance, Mithat's asthma has got worse due to insufficient air in the flat and cumulative dust collected by the newspapers and other items and his refusal to let anyone help him with cleaning the flat. This insanely ardent champion of the past is naturally against the move, but he is unable to resume his resistance. When he becomes unable to buy his own items, Mithat is helped only by Ali, the young doorman who never stops helping the old man even though he is looking for employment and a place to live elsewhere. Already Mithat feels under siege, but it is not until Ali leaves him alone with his items half-packed in boxes and nowhere to go that the film ends. At the start of the film Mithat bought an antique lamp that makes a peculiar noise. In the final scene we hear that noise in the background while Mithat moves towards the dark spot.
