After his voyage to Marco Polo's hometown, Mohamed El-Assyouti takes stock of some of the highlights of the 64th Venice Film Festival IMMY CARTER: MAN OF PLAINS, Jonathan Demme Jonathan Demme, whose latest documentary Man of Plains deals with the life of former US president Jimmy Carter, 83, vis-à-vis the publication in November 2006 of his best seller Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, is the director of Silence of the Lambs (1991), Philadelphia (1993), The Agronomist (2003) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004), and the producer of Mandela (1996). Man from Plains follows the life of the aging politician right before and right after the publication of the book, which wrecked havoc on the media image of a Peace Nobel laureate credited with the Camp David Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1978. The US media, which Carter criticises in the film for lacking "any degree of objectivity at all", accuses him of anti-Semitism, but to the question: "Why do you hate Jews?" he responds by asserting that he is all for the peace of Israel but that it has to come with justice, democracy, peace and freedom to its neighbouring people. A constant refrain repeated in the film is that most of the book's critics and detractors did not read it and that it is not about Israel, in Carter's view a respect-worthy democracy, but about its policy on the Palestinian neighbours whose land it occupies. In his speeches Carter emphasises that 710 streets in the West Bank were closed down, and flyovers constructed to connect the Israeli settlements in land that does not belong to Israel. He compares the olive trees uprooted in Palestine to the trees he inherited from his forebears in their land in Georgia, which has belonged to the family since 1833, wondering how he would feel if some stranger came and took over that land and damaged its trees, mentioning the "religious" and "symbolic" as well as the monetary value of these trees to the Palestinians. In a TV interview he says in defence of his choice of words for the title of the book that "all of their basic rights are taken away from them, which is worse than the blacks under Apartheid in South Africa". One of Carter's detractors says that he is free to have his personal opinion but not his own invented facts. The defence line Carter uses against such accusations is: if you believe this book contains inaccuracies go and see for yourself. Having paid several visits to Gaza, Ramallah and other parts of the Palestinian territories, he advises university students who question his political position to form a delegation and send it on a similar visit to verify his account -- and Demme's film does show the wall surrounding the Palestinian population and the difficulty of carrying out everyday activities -- "Go and see there. Pass through the checkpoints. Just spend three days." Demme's opening sequence shows Carter in a Christian religious gathering giving a sermon- like speech, asking the audience to believe in Jesus, not necessarily in his virgin birth or his other miracles. He tells them that for instance there are Christians who are good believers but unlike him, they support the war on Iraq. Afterwards, he draws the map of Palestinian territories occupied by Israel and shows where the separation walls were built and the density of settlement in the West Bank. Latter in a meeting with students, one tells him that the walls dropped the rate of suicide bombings in Israel by 95 per cent, but Carter explains that in principle the wall should have been built, as Rabin wanted it to be, on the green line, but the purpose of the wall which his successors built -- annexing the "beautiful" Palestinian hills and circling the settlements -- is to occupy land, not to prevent bombings. What Carter regrets is not the controversy his book generated, as he believes it contributed to bringing the Middle East peace issue back to the attention of the media, but, rather, he says, "for the first time to be called a liar, a bigot, an anit- Semite, a coward and a plagiarist: this has hurt me." He adds that he never respected the propagators of these opinions, one of whom is a Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, whom Carter refused to have an open debate with. Dershowitz says that he was present in Palestine during the elections along with Carter and saw how the Hamas victory was democratic but he then goes on to say just like the Allies should have interfered to stop Hilter's rise despite his coming to power according to the free will of the Germans, so stopping Hamas should be the duty of the free world: "They are the equivalent of Nazis. Palestinians made their bed and they have to sleep in it, and it's full of cockroaches." Comparing Hamas to cockroaches, he adds, "Hamas's terrorists are beyond human acceptability." The Rabbis of Phoenix State, who had invited Carter for a discussion, withdrew permission to include them in the film, so their images were redacted, rendering them anonymous. But this was not the worst of the reactions from which Carter suffered: at one book signing ceremony two separate protests took place simultaneously outside the venue. One pro-Palestinian, the other brandishing signs that read, "Book of lies -- hands of a liar", and some of its crowd members shouting "Go back to Jordan. There's no such thing as Palestine. You're nobody. No one cares about you." Carter tells Israeli TV that he is not against Israeli's disengagement from Gaza but against the sealing off of the city -- the economic, maritime and air embargo; he affirms that the Geneva Accords, in which issues of refugees, borders and Jerusalem are addressed, should be the reference point for a peace treaty. On his way out of this interview Carter tells his consultant, "I hope they don't edit out much. What always hurts is the editing." In his interviews Carter's criticism does not spare the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which he says interviews presidency candidates and supports them based on their bias towards Israel, nor the US National Security and President Bush who prevented him from travelling to Syria to talk to Bashar El-Assad, whom he had known since his university days. Demme's camera follows the active former president in several states including Washington, New York, New Orleans -- where only 22 Hurricane Katerina-stricken families were provided with alternative housing -- Phoenix, Atlanta, Philadelphia and in several international disaster zones such as Darfur and Cuba as well as Ghana, as he gives interviews and talks for several TV and radio stations and in a number of universities and academic institutions. A sequence of the film is dedicated to Mrs Carter's memories about his efforts in Camp David, showing historical footage of the negotiations and the press conference that followed them. The film points out that it was Carter's mediations as he met separately with Sadat and Rabin that caused its success. HEYA FAWDA, Youssef Chahine Last Friday was the world premiere of the latest film by veteran director Youssef Chahine, 81, co- directed by his long-time collaborator Khaled Youssef, based on a screenplay by Nasser Abdel-Rahman, and starring Khaled Saleh and Mena Shalabi. Heya Fawda (Chaos) was the last item on the festival's competition screenings programme, and it was followed by a press conference with the director, the producers and some of the cast. The film depicts the police officer Hatem, who turns the Shoubra Police Station into a prison for political activists, fundamentalists, outlaws and prostitutes, illegally detaining whoever he feels like, and torturing the detainees with the implicit support of the inspector and the sheriff. It is Hatem's rival in love, a young prosecutor, who tries to uncover his wrongdoings. Both Youssef and Chahine asserted that the chaos with which the film deals is universal, with the latter remarking that "there is something serious and completely unacceptable, which is a kind of malady and madness that afflicts those who find themselves in positions of power, giving them delusions of grandeur that result in them persecuting those who surround them". Youssef added that since the brutally oppressive regimes of the Third World are supported by America, then the phenomena must be universal. To which Chahine humorously responded with the statement that beating drums ( tabla ) is better than beating others. Critic Maria Pio Fosco highlighted Chahine's comments in La Republica newspaper. Under the headline "With Humour I Fight Fake Democracy", she quotes: "It is not only a film about Cairo or the Third World but it concerns any country where democracy is fake. In the world there is a wrong impression that Egypt is a democratic country, but it is not, and to verify this it is enough to visit the detention rooms in the police stations or see how they deal with demonstrations and protests. In Egypt the power is in the hands of a few who believe they are chosen by God and protect their authority with military and armed violence that does not respect any law. In every country in the world where authoritarian rule hides behind a sham democracy, there are militias that do not respect legitimacy and law. The events of the film take place in Shubra, which is similar to many quarters in Cairo, which was in the 1930s one of the best cities in the world. That is why my rage is so great. The film is dedicated to all citizens of my country, and to all those who carry on living in resignation and acceptance of the misery inflicted on most families, submitting rather than rebelling against the oppression of freedoms in the name of law and order. I teach in the Cinema Institute and incite my students to protest and demonstrate, and I go with them to receive my share of beating by sticks. And I'm very harsh with those who don't join because the blows from police sticks also help one to grow-up." In this respect Chahine added in the conference that the basic test in the education process is to learn how to think, and whether you are capable of thinking independently or not. "Everything in the regime is against the young, and its vanity makes it incapable of changing themselves or bringing about change in the country, so they remain content with alleging that 'we are the most beautiful civilization in the world,'" he added. To a question about the similarity of the rebellion of the women in Heya Fawda to that in Al-Osfour (The Sparrow) where only the nature of the war is different from one film to the other, Chahine responded, "I believe women are the stronger in confronting the oppression of the police, and they earned their share of sticks and blows. The greatest Egyptian political activists were women, as well as the greatest producers in history. I also believe that women's tolerance of injustice is much less than that of men." Khaled Youssef added that "the situation of the Egyptian woman has changed recently as she is deprived of her rights and is subjected to great injustice, and this is clear in the film from the police officer's rape of the female protagonist. There is a constant violation of women's rights and their humanity." About the influence of Italian cinema Chahine says that in the 1950s he studied, in particular, the films of Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini; sometimes, he added, he even imitated them. He liked the star Anna Magnani; Rossellini paid him a visit at home, where he taught him how to make pasta with oregano. Youssef said that he belonged to Chahine's cinema "100 percent", having studied all his films very meticulously before, 17 years ago, he started to work as his assistant then eventually as co-director. "Next to someone of Chahine's weight and value, one has to hide behind him and endeavour to make films with the same flavour and features as his cinema. The audience expected in Heya Fawda to see a Chahine film, not a Khaled Youssef film and I respected this while working. Even while shooting a scene which we did not discuss I knew how to apply Chahine's vision in order to make the film consistent with his style." Chahine said that Youssef's modesty and their common political and artistic tenets helped the collaboration, making all their discussions positive. Youssef also remarked that the trained and confrontational relationship between legislative and executive power as depicted in the film is common in Third World countries where the police represent the fascist side of authority, while men of the law seek to establish justice. Chahine concluded by saying that he feels young and that the age is not in the skin, so he stopped looking in the mirror. It is the interior that matters, he believes, and the desire and will to go on giving. LA GRAINE ET LE MULET, Abdel-Latif Kechiche Tunisian-French filmmaker Abdel-Latif Kechiche's third film La graine et le mulet (The Grain and the Mullet) -- as with his previous films, Kechiche wrote the screenplay and directed -- received both the festival's Special Jury Award, which it shared with Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, and Best Young Actress for Hafsia Herzi. Both are well deserved, as this had been the film most expected to win awards throughout the duration of the festival. Kechiche's debut La faute à Voltaire (Blame it on Voltaire, 2000) was selected in Venice and his L'ésquive (The Evasion or Games of Love and Chance, 2003) received French Cézar Award for best film, direction and screenplay. In La graine et le mulet he achieved a very special 151-minute film depicting a group of North African expatriates living in French Mediterranean city of Sète. After being made redundant Slimani, 61, a boat repairman, is living at the small hotel owned by his mistress, apart from his ex-wife and five children, each of whom has their independent life. He thinks of buying an old boat and turning it into a restaurant specialised in mullet fish with couscous, which his ex-wife excels at. As members of the small North African community consolidate their efforts in support of Slimani's project, which is facing resistance and indifference from the French bureaucracy, the bind of these Arab immigrants in Europe comes to the fore. The very humanity of lovable characters who, as the Italian critics remarked, are not judged by the filmmaker, as they each has a mixture of good and bad in them. There is rivalry between the mistress and the ex-wife. There is a son who constantly cheats on his own Russian wife. There is a daughter married to a Frenchman. All three daughters are jealous of the mistress and her attractive daughter, who is Slimani's most dependable help on the torturous path of French bureaucracy, and who finally, to save the face of Slimani when he fails to put food on the table of the Frenchmen who have come to judge his aptitude as a restaurant owner, puts on a red belly- dance outfit and herself on display, with pelvic thrusts and fleshy tummy shimmies -- an 18- minute long scene -- recalling Soad Hosni's dance in Hassan El-Imam's Khali balak min Zouzou (Pay Attention to Zouzou, 1973) where Zouzou does a similar improvised show to substitute for her mother who was booed off the stage. Kechiche's visual style depends on hand-held camera and zoom lenses in their narrow telephoto range capturing close-ups of characters coming to life. The scene durations are quiet long, with many repetitions of ideas, but then several events are skipped and their having taken place can be inferred. This free narrative style gives the film a realistic feel; only the poignant, intense moments are included, but are looked at meditatively. The inclusion of two elements which characterise the Arab stereotype in the West -- namely the couscous and the belly dance -- not only exposes the superficiality of that stereotype but show how these are the only things that can whet the appetite of a French audience, be it the invitees in Slimani's restaurant or those in the cinema watching the film, which with the profound human depths it reaches in depicting its characters emphasises that there is more to the reality of Arabs in Europe than meets the eye. They are required to walk a tightrope all their lives, unable to return to lbled (native country) nor to be integrated into French society. They do not have much job security, nor does their adapting to the Western lifestyle undermine their strong sense of community, which transcends their petty jealousies and gossip; this solidarity can only postpone the imminent, disastrous issue of survival. LA VIA DEL PETROLIO, Bernardo Bertolucci The festival presented Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci with a Special Lion Award on the occasion of its 75th anniversary for his life-time achievement, screening the recently found and restored documentary La via del petrolio (The Road of Oil, 1966), which depicts in three parts the journey of black gold from the Persian Gulf and the Iranian deserts, through Sinai and the Suez Canal, to Genoa whence to be exported to Switzerland and Germany. The film compares the countries of the South, which are behind in terms of industry and technology and thus do not need their oil reserves, and the countries of the North, which import it. The documentary comments on how in desert places like Iran and Sinai, things will no longer be the same; and it highlights the importance of the Suez Canal for this trade where every six minutes a ship carrying oil passes. Bertolucci compares the white man's hunt for oil to Captain Ahab's hunt for Moby Dick in the eponymous novel, where the whale is compared to the elusive progress that industrialisation and capitalism promised. Implicitly the film's visuals and commentary show the effect of the oil industry on the environment, contrasting the sooty and greasy world to which the exploitation of oil has given way to life close to nature -- whether in Europe or in the South. In this documentary about the activities of the Italian Agip oil company, the master filmmaker made a an audio- visual document, with several poetic touches -- such as the black dog resembling the company's logo seen in different places of the world following the trail of the oil -- where he points out the change that was taking place on a universal scale, with oil now entering the money-power equation that fuels the engine of history. Posting the modern For weeks before this conversation took place, Marco Mèller, artistic director of the 64th round of the Venice International Film Festival, had been the star of the Italian press. On its 75th anniversary -- the festival, which first took place in 1932, was cancelled 12 times -- Mèller managed to organise a remarkable round; this being the end of his present term, it is not clear whether he will remain at Venice or move to Cannes next year. In either case, he says he wants time to continue producing films through, among other entities, his Bolognia-based Downtown Productions. Notwithstanding the death of Antonioni, which you say marked the end of modernity in cinema, I believe there are some excellent films in the festival this year. We all know that historically in all three major festivals -- Cannes, Venice and to a certain degree Berlin -- the total number of really good films screened in a round never exceeds 20. The fact that you can see five or six of these in Venice is already a good result. The more important thing is to consider ourselves lucky and look at the bright side: things are still taking shape. Fortunately, we can still use the category of "postmodern", also because it seems to be built above that of "modern" as genre. As a category it went through stages and was an extension of "modern" easily expressed by the notion of "postmodern" until it acquired its own place. But to talk about the contemporary, we have to begin addressing a new thing which is no longer a category, a genre, a style but in a certain way a transcription of the passage from what we have called and continue to call "cinema" to what can be always one of the mediums of research inside the visible, or the visual sphere; something that has to do with how the sphere of the visible can develop in a short period of time. The times we are in give me reason to seek out symptoms of the contemporary more in Horizon section films than in those of the competition or official selection called Masters; at the present moment modern cinema is dead but lacks the courage to admit it, while contemporary cinema is not yet born. From the works of Roberto Rossellini through those of the great Japanese masters -- as in the last films of Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu -- to some of the work of the great Americans, but also Youssef Chahine's Bab El-Hadid (Cairo Central Station): all arrived at a time when the "classical" was dead but did not want to realise it, while the "modern" cinema of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) and the new Latin American cinema had not yet arrived. I believe we live in a period that corresponds exactly to that of the 1950s. It had begun in Hollywood with the works of those who wanted to stylise, inventing the "modern" within the forms of the "classical" such as Val Lewton; they were followed by Samuel Fuller, who moved further towards the "modern" but still remained within the "classical". I have the impression that what took place between 1947 and 1957 can be compared to the present period, which began in the late 1990s more or less. I don't believe that dividing the history of cinema into decades serves or answers anything. However, the advent of the new light-weight camera as well as the extension of the frontiers of vision thanks to the invention of new technologies which found their way to cinema have changed it. As we have seen, it is a cinema that does not accept the narrative conventions of linear storytelling and causality chains which highlight a necessary relation between cause and effect in which everything must be explained and no ambiguities can be kept. This departure from convention had prepared for a passage into films which can finally say, "There is no longer any need for a cinematic object of true originality to explain." So the relation in the cinema becomes like the that of a spectator looking at an artwork that he does necessarily fully understand, and the important thing, rather, is to be struck by a certain emotion. In this respect it is a joy for me to find Youssef Chahine returning to form with a kind of cinema to which the particular Italian term "arealismo" applies. It is a cinema which in a sense is always a grand stylisation of reality, like a brush which as it cleans the "real" leaves behind traces of dust and grease -- a stylisation bearing the mark of the "real". True, this may have something to do with Chahine working with a new team: Nasser Abdel-Rahman, who also wrote Yousry Nasrallah's new film, and co-director Khaled Youssef. Indeed, Nasrallah too should've been here with his film -- I've read the screenplay -- which I believe will be one of his best. That would've been a great return of Egyptian cinema with two major filmmakers. In this sense, I believe it is an important year for Egyptian cinema because despite the fact that Saudi capital has found its way into the Egyptian film industry, there are at least two filmmakers, maybe there are others too, who endeavour to impede the machine from working in only the foreseen manner. It may be true that Nikita Mikalkov's film is weak but there are regulations which govern decisions for film selections and in Cannes the same thing happens. Some work by major names can turn out to be disappointing for some. I can obviously love some films more than others but then there is a majority vote for the final selection. In the case of Mikalkov's film all five members of the selection committee had absolutely loved the film. And it is right that I respect the opinions of the others. The committee is made of five critics, and each of them has his aesthetic criteria for determining why one film is better than the other, whether politics come into that criteria or not. If it was up to me I would have selected for the competition some of the films in the Horizons section such as Jçlio Bressane's Cléopatra. But the choice is not all mine. The Venice Festival must in some way give a picture of what happens in world cinema in six months, if not the whole year. For that the opinions of others are important. As for cinema from Southeast Asia, I know Asian cinema well, besides other cinemas of course; I have written books about it and know the languages of Southeast Asia. What is interesting there is something similar to what happened in American cinema with a film like Todd Haynes's I'm Not There or Wes Craven's The Darjeeling Limited, in the sense that it suddenly became possible to dispense with considerable financial means to make a film with the maximum creative liberty. This had been the case with the Southeastern Asian film industry for sometime, because they had always known how to work with a plurality of production means and create a correspondence between them and a plurality of the modes of expression. In this sense, and especially in Japan, followed first by Hong Kong, then China and finally South Korea, since the 1950s there has always been a constant referencing of the conventional Hollywood code systems, which the Asians subvert. This happens when there are new cineasts and filmmakers who are asked to respect these conventional codes but then they do so only to affirm the contrary, showing the extent their originality can reach. It is enough to think of the popular commercial cinema -- which at times had success also in Egypt. For instance, some of the filmmakers who made Japanese commercial films such those of the sword fights, the Samurai and the Yakuza gangster genres, themselves took the responsibility to reveal their cinema's distance from the conventional horizons. Then come the cineasts from Hong Kong, who are more recent -- it is enough to mention the names of John Woo, Tsui Hark and now in my opinion also Johnnie Toe. In Toe's in-competition film Mad Detective, the story is not the interesting thing, but how it is a film about the cinema that is built on what was film noir but can never go back to being it. And it is Hollywood-like, you're right. Why shouldn't there be a Hollywood remake? Interesting things are coming out of your part of the world too, absolutely. That's why I spoke before about the domination of Saudi capital of almost all the means of production in the Egyptian film industry: I do believe it is important to have cineasts who become empêcheurs de pensée ronde -- directors capable of circular reasoning. Egyptian cinema has a maximum of ten such great filmmakers. In the Maghreb countries, there has been a whole range. The important advantage of each of these countries has been the number of its cineasts. We've been seeing interesting things from Tunisia and Morocco. The film that struck us most was that of Kechiche, also because we had the chance to see it in different working versions; we had believed in it from the start. I believe the only option for realism is that of Kechiche's, which is different from the socialist realism of Ken Loach's film. In Kechiche ideas and sentiments from a plethora of directors whom I love and personally consider very important for us contemporaries converge. From a cinema that heightens the vision of the human being, which was a particular trait of Moroccan cinema in the past, to the Southern influences that can be traced to the French cinema of Marcel Pagnol, to Roberto Rossellini, who allows small incidents and accidents at the moment of filming to change the scene, which can sometimes unbalance it. It is a film where, indeed, the length of the scene is not just an artistic choice, but a better way to capture part of the things and the human beings being portrayed, whom we see as they really are and not as we want them to be. Interview by Mohamed El-Assyouti
