CAIRO - IT seems that an anti-addiction campaign recently launched across the nation will fail if movie stars continue behaving the way they do on screen. The campaign " on television, in the press and in posters pasted up in busy streets " depicts young junkies whom addiction has turned into desperate wretches, in a bid to prevent their peers from flirting with narcotics. But the organisers and many members of the public complain that superstars who play addicts or drug barons are having an adverse effect on the campaign. The traumatised families of drug addicts complain that their children picked up this destructive habit from their film idols. The critics agree, explaining that superstars are seen on TV or the silver screen happily smoking joints or sniffing cocaine or heroine, as if it were something ‘mature and sophisticated'. Superstars who act the roles of powerful drug barons are also sending out the wrong signals to the nation's youth. Surprisingly, the national anti-addiction campaign has coincided with the release in local cinemas of several films featuring the police's war on drug traffickers. These movies teach viewers how to roll joints and show young men smoking drugs together in the presence of half-naked women making suggestive remarks. Although he confesses that films based on the war on drugs have always been common in Egyptian cinema, the veteran film critic Rafiq al-Sabban condemns recent movie productions, such as the biopic Ibrahim Al-Abiyad and Sahar el-Laiyali (Sleepless Nights), for concentrating on drug-taking, which in both cases is vital to the plot. In an interview with October magazine, al-Sabban appealed for directors and scriptwriters to think twice before including scenes involving drug addicts in their movies. "Such a policy can seriously backfire," he warns, "if the lead actor in such films is a big box office name". Al-Sabban pays tribute to a few films, such as Al-Aar (Shame), starring Nour el-Sherif, and Al-Modmen (The Drug Addict), starring the late Ahmed Zaki, for contributing positively to the war on drugs. "These two films in particular have succeeded in exposing the disastrous impact of drug addiction in society from a social perspective," the film critic notes. But he's not so impressed with Al-Batniya (named after a notorious district near Old Cairo, which was controlled by drug lords and dealers until the police wiped them out in a huge raid in the 1990s). According to al-Sabban, Al-Batniya, starring Nadia el-Guindi, wasn't interested in the negative impact of drugs. According to art critic Mahmoud Qassem, filmmaking was first exploited in the antidrug war in the country in 1939, with Cocaine, written and directed by Togu Merzahi, who was widely regarded as the pioneer of commercialised cinema in Egypt. The Egyptian Revolution in 1952 also sought the filmmakers' help in its unrelenting war against drug dealers. The filmmakers responded enthusiastically, producing a series of big hits. These movies, starring legends like comedian Ismail Yassin and late swashbuckling actors Farid Shawki and Mahmoud el-Melegi, all no longer with us, are still very popular today.
