By the Mediterranean beach, Hani Mustafa looks north The Alexandria Film Festival is among a handful of international events that focus on Mediterranean cinema. In previous years the festival suffered organisational and logistical drawbacks which took away from its status as an important event held in Egypt's second capital. Yet this year the government, which organises the festival, paid special attention to it. In the presence of the Minister of Culture and the global film star Omar Sharif, the festival opened with Ahmad Maher's Al-Musafir -- a ministry production -- on one of the few occasions on which the festival has opened with an Egyptian film. Still, organisational pitfalls remain a principal aspect of the festival: public screenings were held without tickets to draw in a greater audience but the theatres were never full; the selection of the young actress Zeina on the jury was likewise widely frowned upon, and it is a completely unsuccessful move, since Zeina's limited experience is gleaned from Egyptian commercial cinema and puts her in no position to judge art films from different cultures. The problems of the festival however are not simply due to limited resources or faulty organization; the organisers, in addition, are unable to see the festival in the broader context of similar events worldwide, and as such to envisage a more effective event that may give Egypt back some of its former importance as a film producer in the region. The festival's regional orientation has steered the programme in the direction of many political issues of the region, with most of the films in question recounting the story of (illegal) immigration from the south to the north of the Mediterranean. Perhaps the most important of these is Welcome by the French filmmaker Philipphe Lioret, which records the details of a journey of a 17-year-old Kurd named Bilal moving from France to England. The film opens with the arrival of Bilal from northern Iraq to this point in Europe, his final destination being London. Sometimes the purpose of the director is restricted to registering the suffering of illegal immigrants on their journeys to new and supposedly if hardly ever in reality better lives, yet in the case of Welcome Lioret is gives Bilal an emotional purpose by placing his beloved in England, where her father has a job. Such emotional underpinning is present throughout the film, as if to bolster up the principal dramatic line. The opening focuses on the lives of a number of illegal immigrants in France: their gatherings, NGOs that provide them with food, escape attempts on the part of some of them (often in trucks travelling between France and England, wearing plastic bags for the border crossing in order to prevent their breath from showing on equipment that registers CO2 levels on board.) The drama is deeply entertaining: Bilal, for example, thinks of swimming across the Channel but he requires a trainer; he makes the acquaintance of the 50-year-old swimmer Simone, who is lonely because his marriage is coming to an end, and the director expertly depicts the disruption in that relationship, balancing friendship with separation, a state that reaches a peak in one scene where love-making verges on rape. Simone's loneliness drives him to take Bilal under his wing, and training him in order to help him realise his dream even though he knows it is practically impossible and means that he will lose Bilal too. The film also deals with the racism illegal immigrants suffer at the hands of the police and some citizens, driven largely by the policies of the Sarcozy government. Another film that deals with the illegal immigration of Kurds -- this time into Turkey -- is Atil Inaç's A Step Into Darkness. It is the story of a Kurdish girl named Cennet whose family was killed in the course of an American bombardment on her home village during the war on Iraq. Her only option was to immigrate to Turkey, along with a number of other Kurdish villagers including Islamist fighters. The script is limited to a single story line, which is the journey of that girl in search of her brother, who was severely injured in the bombardment and managed to make to Istanbul for treatment. Up until Cennet's arrival in Istanbul, Inaç manages -- with a little artifice -- to register the natural beauty of the area between Iraqi Kurdistan and southern Turkey, and the difficulties of moving through mountains. Such scenes make up a unique cinematic language that is quite effective, thus far avoiding melodrama despite the complex emotional state of the protagonist. Yet conversations about Islamist violence mark the naïve and mediocre transformation that takes place in the film in Istanbul, registering how girls like Cennet are enlisted as suicide bombers. Declamations by the imam of the Islamist jama'ah are laughable, yet the ending of the film -- in which Cennet fails to carry out her suicide operation while her brother, whom she was told has died, walks out of the hospital, passing her without either of them noticing the other -- is perhaps the height of ridiculousness. The Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Zbalic's On the Path also deals with Islamic extremism but presents it in a much more convincing way as a transformation within Bosnian society, where Islam turns from a creed in a secular context to an enforced and oppressive way of life. With extreme precision, it tells the story of an air hostess named Luna and her friend Amar, who cohabit without marriage as is common practice in Europe. Amar is fired as a flight observer due to drinking on the job, and his resulting depression while he fails to find alternative work complicates his relationship with Luna. The dramatic shift occurs when Amar runs into an old friend who has turned into an Islamic extremist: they had fought together during the Yugoslavian civil war. From then on the film is disturbingly reminiscent of Egyptian television drama that has dealt with extremism, especially those depicting the isolationist tendencies of some jama'ahs which, declaring the apostasy of society, instituted alternative, "fundamentalist" communities in remote places. Zbalic registers the details of daily life in one such community where Amar finds work, and the transformation that thus occurs in him quickly becomes apparent, ending his relationship with Luna who no longer wants to have a child by him. The Moroccan filmmaker Hassan Benjalloun's The Forgotten is an extremely direct and melodramatic depiction of Moroccan girls who travel to work in Europe only to discover that the Moroccan middle man who enables them to emigrate illegally is in fact an agent of the global prostitution mafia and that the girls have fallen into a form of enslavement. The script advances two ideas in parallel lines. The first concerns a young man from the vicinity of Fes who immigrates to Brussels to look for work, while the second relates the story of his girlfriend and fellow villager who is cast out of the village when her bridegroom discovers she is not a virgin. She decides to catch up with her boyfriend in Brussels, only to end up as a prostitute. The script moves from one to the other, depicting their suffering as it were in exile. The young man is an example of Moroccan workers abused by greedy employers, while the woman suffers persecution and violence from one woman and several men who employ her in prostitution. Yet the film has an unconvincing Hollywood ending, when the young man confronts the gang to save his beloved after he finds out about her situation. This is one of the weakest features on the programme of the festival, predictable and mawkish -- so much so that the viewer knows in advance even about the suicide of one of the Moroccan prostitutes.
