At the third annual Panorama of European Film, an initiative of the producer-director Marianne Khoury, Hani Mustafa is spoiled for choice The Austrian director Michael Haneke is among the most important directors in Europe; festivals and critics have anticipated his productions with joy since his earliest work, and he has repeatedly received some of the world's most significant awards. And this applies to every movie he made between 2000 and 2009: for The Piano Teacher (2002) and Code Unknown (2000) he received jury prizes; for Cache (2005), the best director prize; and for (2009), the Palme d'Or. He is among the pillars of auteur cinema in the last three decades, and no doubt the screening of for the first time in Egypt is a major occasion. Nazism has been the subject of many American as well as European, mainstream as well as art-house films -- being among the latest. The challenge is to balance art with political-moral statement, whether based on tragedy or comedy, and there are many possible cinematic perspectives on Nazism. The phenomenon did not emerge out of nothing, nor did its effects end with the fall of the Third Reich. Haneke does not seem to be interested in Nazism from a political standpoint. He presents, rather, a mosaic of details demonstrating the emergence of violence in inter- war Germany. It is as if the artist wants to create a pandora's box of evils. Yet the action is restricted to small, remote village in the German countryside. From the artistic viewpoint, initially seems to be a very classical film. This impression results from a number of factors, among them the presence of a narrator and the fact that it is black-and-white. The fact that the film opens in the early 1910s, shortly prior to the outbreak of World War I, reinforces the sense of classic cinema. Yet the structure of the film is wholly different from classical cinematic narrative: there is no complication, climax and denouement. It opens, instead, with the village doctor falling off his horse at the entrance to the village; soon a number of the men realise that the horse had been made to fall on purpose: someone had tied a thread between two trees to trip it up. Here as elsewhere in select parts of the film, the story is told by a narrator. The viewer knows nothing of that narrator until, several scenes into the film, it becomes apparent that he is the young village teacher, who witnessed and researched some of the events in question. The narrator serves to explain and comment on events and to create two time-frames, reducing immersion in the action somewhat. Many violent and debatable events take place: the children intentionally harming the baron's son; the burning of grain... But the worst event of all is the beating up of a village boy with Down's syndrome. But after each one of these events, the village -- in which most of the conventional social types and classes are represented -- returns to a seemingly normal life. The baron represents feudalism, but authority lies in the hands of the forever unsmiling pastor; there is a doctor and a nurse-midwife (who are in a relationship), and besides the teacher-narrator, there are all the poor peasants. Oppression abounds: the pastor reads out to his children the corporal punishment to be meted out to them when they have done wrong; and wraps a white ribbon around their wrists to mark them. The doctor and the baron abuse the midwife and the baroness, respectively. Oppression is male, patriarchal -- as if Haneke is tracing the horrors of Nazism back to these provincial attitudes, but only in the least obvious way imaginable. Implication and doubt are indeed Haneke's principal modes of operation in the script. He does not seek a resolution, he does not seek the truth as such; he has made a film far too difficult to find meaning in this way. At the end the various threads do come together in one or two scenes, when the teacher implies that the pastor's children might be responsible for the violence. In one scene the daughter, only a child, sneaks into her father's office and takes his pet bird out of the cage; later we see the bird placed on the bureau, dead, with a pair of scissors in its neck. How can children be capable of such violence? Is it the need for revenge? Perhaps the answer is in the title, which is associated with punishment -- coded, organised violence. The viewer comes out of , which lasts for two and half hours, in a state of astonishment and incomprehension. It takes time and mulling over to begin to register what it was all about. Beautifully made, the film deploys wonderful acting and a fascinating mode of communication that subtly creeps up on you. On the streets of Cairo, one does not feel so far removed from that remote village in Germany -- or the possibility of horrendous consequences resulting from similar attitudes increasingly prevalent here now. Such universality is something Haneke himself mentioned in the course of the Cannes screening last year. *** Terrorism and fascism are two sides of the same coin and they are lethal forces that stand in the way of peace on earth. Such is the basic message of the French filmmaker Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men, which received Cannes's grand prix this year. The film deals with a real-life incident that took place in Algeria in the mid-1990s, when seven monks serving in an Atlas Mountains monastery were kidnaped by Islamist militants and, following the failure of international intercessions to release them, were all killed. The film is slow-paced and easy-going, in line with the life of the monks whose inner peace the film attempts to transmit to the viewer by immersing her in the details of their daily life. But perhaps such a technique in camera movement and editing is intended to be in contrast to what happens after the Islamists approach the village and the monastery, spreading horror as they pass (by, for example, slaughtering a group of Croatians building a road in the area). The director depicts services that the monks offer to the community as well as their prayer routines. They cultivate the land and work as doctors and teachers. The drama is so classical it seems to be derived from fairy tales, where there are black and white characters: evil souls dripping with violence in contrast to good, quiet souls spreading peace. Yet the dramatic conflict is not so much between those two poles as among the evil souls themselves. This is a major political and military conflict of the 1990s which will be still fresh in the minds of those who keep up with the news in this part of the world, pitting Algerian fundamentalists against the Algerian army. In the film the forces of good are represented by the monks, who remain outside this conflict and once they come in contact with it they perish. The villagers who live around the monastery on the other hand have no role to play in the drama itself but is a politically correct gesture on the part of a director eager to show that there are after all good peaceful Muslims who like the monks as much as "us". The dramatic crisis in the film occurs when the Islamists, having killed the Croatians, approach the monastery. They require a physician because there are wounded parties among them. But Father Christian (Lambert Wilson), the head of the monastery, confronts the Islamists unarmed, refusing to let the doctor go with them and stressing that they can bring their wounded to the monastery where they will be given complete medical care. It is at this point that the monks begin to wonder whether they are in personal danger; an Algerian official advises that they should leave and return to France. A division occurs among the monks: some feel that going would be holding on to the mundane at the expense of their responsibility to heaven; others feel that personal security is as important as what services they are committed to. Little time is spent on these debates, which take place over two sessions, because it is already clear that the monks are in danger. The more important aspect of this part of the film is how the filmmaker depicts the fear that besets the monks and how they counter it with prayers. The vision of the director is conventional especially where the fighters are concerned, whether on the side of the army or the Islamists. This is clear even in the casting and acting technique: the theatricality of the fighters as opposed to the smooth, quiet acting of the monks. This is no doubt due to the filmmaker paying more attention to the major roles undertaken by the French actors; that is why other characters come across as much weaker. And no doubt notions of heroism and sacrifice are noble but they have become less important in drama than simpler and more naturalistically human emotions and ideas. And there is a reason for this: heroes are not beset by interesting transformations, they do not present a spectrum of good and bad intentions for the director to explore. They are too idealistic to be human. As such, for the two hours' duration of the film, there is little beyond the tribute paid to the martyred monks -- and perhaps it was to them that the grand prix went, too.
