is the author of Have we met before?, a recent hit film. She talked to Rania Khallaf about her debut feature and future projects Have we met before?, a film that enjoyed much success in Egyptian cinemas recently is screenplay-writer 's first feature and a development of her graduation project at the Academy of Arts, Screenplay Department, in Cairo. For Shams and the film's director Hisham el-Shafie the film is a first experience, making its success with Egyptian audiences all the more gratifying. Shams, who graduated from the Academy of Arts in 2000 following a first degree from the Faculty of Mass Communication at Cairo University in 1995, first became known as a writer as long ago as the mid 1990s when she produced a collection of short stories entitled Threads on Circles with a group of five young writers, an example of the so-called "girls' writing" of the time. Have we met before? was therefore part of a new direction in her career, and it was also a crash course in the practicalities and economic aspects of writing for cinema. "After long discussions with [director] El-Shafie, I became convinced that a film with a linear plot would have the greatest chance of making it into production," Shams says. "So, we worked together on my original script, getting rid of some characters and finding new dimensions for others. It took us about a year to come up with a revised script that would fit within the production budget. All in all, the film was written in a kind of workshop atmosphere, with the director collaborating on the screenplay." As well as being written in a collaborative way, Have we met before? also calls upon the talents of a new generation of actors, allowing them to show off their skills to best advantage. Actress Caroleen Khalil, for example, a friend of Shams who has already made a name for herself in theatre and television drama, stars in the film and even helped to shape it. Written throughout in a direct, intimate style, Shams's screenplay gave Khalil ample opportunity for her spontaneous, improvised style of acting. As the final version of the screenplay took shape, Shams says, "we talked through the film together, discussing how to express the feelings of the young woman who is at the centre of the film. She is in love with a young pilot, but she feels she cannot marry him since she is scared of the idea of marriage," possibly because she believes that "marriage spoils what is best in marriage." For Shams, the collaborative aspect of the screenplay was part of her more general desire to find ideas wherever these might be found in world cinema. "I found my niche by using modern techniques, such as manipulating the narrative line and juxtaposing different characters at different times. However, what has really influenced me has been the kind of films that have been coming out of Southeast Asia," and she cites directors such as the Korean Hong Sang-Soo and the Hong Kong native Wong Kar-wai. While Shams's debut picture might be described as a "light" film, it nevertheless tackles important issues relating to the position of women in Egyptian society, discussing issues such as marital relations, betrayal and divorce. This desire to approach serious issues in a light- hearted way was part of the intention behind the film, Shams says, since "even when you are tackling big issues, they can be made more real for people if they are approached in a light way." Light, however, does not mean superficial. "I am against melodrama as a way of delivering serious messages," Shams explains. "My job is to find a bright area in human life, even if I talk about death in my film. It is a way of finding humour even in the saddest situations." As if in vindication of Sham's ideas, Have we met before? has stimulated debate among young people about relationships and the emotional issues confronting them. While some young people have seen in the film a debate about a women's right to choose whether to get married or to enter into a relationship outside wedlock, others have seen it as part of a wider trend in contemporary filmmaking, already clear in the popular film Sahar el-layaly written by Tamir Habeeb, which also discusses relationships. For Shams, however, there is little connection between the two films. Her film was written years before Sahar el-layaly, she says, and any similarity between the two pictures is coincidental, and in fact Shams's script does seem to many to be the more sophisticated one. Not only is there much less talk, but the script is also tighter and more concise. Shams's film gives space for meditation, urging audiences to think about open-ended relationships, whereas in Sahar el-layaly the problems pertaining to marital relationships all look as if they are on the way to being peacefully solved. Regarding projects after Have we met before ?, Shams says that she has recently finished writing a new film with Tamir Ezzat, another young scriptwriter. The two writers have already cooperated on an hour-long documentary called The Place I call Home that looks at different conceptions of home. The film won several prizes, among them a prize from the Al-Jazeera news channel and a prize at the 2006 round of the Rotterdam Arab Film Festival. "Tamir Ezzat and I decided to develop a new idea out of our previous film, and we finally came up with a new scenario. The new film again revolves around the concept of home, this time through the perceptions of three young people. They present their ideas of homeland, and their visions of what home could be. However different their views might be, they are all connected by the fact that each person was born on the same day. Now that we have finished writing the script, we have to start looking for a producer." Though Shams's films are sometimes seen within the framework of today's fashionable "Youth Cinema" movement, she nevertheless criticises the current production system. "It is short-sighted, since it is only possible to find a producer for films that deal with subjects that have already had proven success with Egyptian audiences," Shams says, "which runs counter to the fact that cinema production always entails some sort of risk." "The result has been that the cinema scene in Egypt today has become one of "waves," each one of which appears and then disappears at speed. It might even be more accurate to say that the scene is characterised by passing moods, which come and go according to the success of a comic, detective or action movie." "While there are exceptions to this rule -- Yousri Nasrallah's Fish Garden, for example, puts the viewer in a quite different mood because of his different style of narration -- in general our generation is the product of a fading culture. I am no exception to this, but I want to make some sort of breach in what has been a narrowing circle." Shams points to another problem in today's film production, which is what she calls a "misunderstanding of the concept of audience," even if a positive sign has been the higher budgets now available to filmmakers. There should be more than one audience for a film, Shams explains, meaning that a film "should appeal to a particular audience not to 'the audience' in general. This misconception of the target audience results in movies all looking the same and seeking to satisfy only one audience." "For my part, I want to write about different age groups, not just about young people. I want to write about men in their seventies, women in their forties, and all those marginal characters whom we rarely see on screen. I want to write about the character of my own grandfather; about men in general, not just about young women." In fact while her debut film, which remained in cinemas for nine weeks, has released a sort of passion for feminism in her, Shams does not describe herself as "a feminist" and she certainly does not want to be typecast as a young female scriptwriter who only writes about the problems of young women. "I might be the opposite of a feminist in fact," Shams says mischievously, "though I do not really know what the opposite might be." "The problem with being a 'feminist writer' is that you can fall into the trap of defending a certain category of people at the expense of all others. Denial of a part of the picture is not the right thing to do. I believe that some men might be 'repressed' by women, and I have a horror of the notion of women in general being just the victims of men." In fact, "the work of my generation of scriptwriters relates to global issues and to stories that could take place anywhere on the globe and not just in Egypt," Shams says. "Our works lie somewhere in the middle: while they can look unoriginal from a western point of view, they are still debatable from a local perspective." Shams has recently taken part in a ten-day scriptwriting workshop held in Cairo with a visiting American scholar. Many amateurs took part, and the whole occasion was less professional than might have been feared. "It was useful, and it gave me clues for my next project," Shams says. "But what we really need in Egypt is to be exposed to other schools of scriptwriting, rather than just the American way of doing things. It is a pity that 95 per cent of the movies that are available are American. Independent film organisations and the Higher Institute of Cinema should play a more active role in this respect, inviting European and Asian lecturers to hold workshops, in order to revitalise Egyptian cinema."
