Roots of the New Arab Film by Armes Roy;

Author:Armes, Roy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Egypt

We have already noted Youssef Chahine’s inspirational role in offering the example of a new kind of Arab filmmaking from which younger filmmakers across the region could draw inspiration. His work in the 1980s also offered a specific new model of production finance, drawing on foreign funding sources, such as the French Fonds Sud Cinéma. This allowed Chahine to create an internationally recognized Egyptian cinema, acclaimed at festivals worldwide, that was not wholly dependent on local Egyptian box office receipts. His own production company, Misr International Films, gained valuable experience that could be passed on through coproduction agreements. This was the particular mode of independent production followed by two of his most talented former assistant directors, Yousry Nasrallah and Asma El Bakry (the name is variously spelled in different transliterations) from the late 1980s and early 1990s onward. Both worked consistently outside the structures of the Egyptian commercial industry.

Yousry Nasrallah was born in Cairo in 1952 and, like Chahine, was born into a Christian family. After studies of economics and sociology at Cairo University, he followed the conventional pattern of those wishing eventually to become film directors in Egypt. He studied at the Cairo Higher Cinema Institute, had a spell as a film critic in Beirut, and then worked as assistant to a number of directors, including Volker Schlöndorf, Omar Amiralay, and Youssef Chahine. He worked as assistant to Chahine on a number of films, from Farewell Bonaparte onward, and coscripted Alexandria—Now and Forever. In return, Chahine produced Nasrallah’s first features and used the contacts made through his production company to help him receive support from French coproducers and from the Fonds Sud Cinéma.

Nasrallah’s debut film, Summer Thefts / Vols d’été / Sariqât sayfiyyah (1988)—which is, according to Benjamin Geer, “largely autobiographical”215—offers a vivid look at Egypt in the summer of 1961, as Nasser’s land reforms began to take shape. The previous social organization had clear boundaries between the wealthy landowners and the peasants who worked in their fields and owned nothing. Nasser, heard several times on the radio, promises a radical social reform that throws everything into confusion.

The previous situation established clear social distinctions between the two classes, though there were inevitably relationships that crossed the boundaries, examples of which are portrayed in the film. There is a tentative relationship between the feminist-minded Dahlia and Abdallah, a young peasant boy offered an education by the family, and there are also complex emotions for the women who spend their lives as servants in the big house and develop particularly close relationships with the children growing up there, who spend more time with them than with their parents. It is in this context that a friendship develops between Yasser and a peasant boy, Leil.

The film concentrates on the people in the big house who are deeply affected by Nasser’s proposals. Since the land has been inherited by three sisters, there are inevitably tensions between them and their husbands about how to deal with the situation and whether to sell. There are also marital complications.

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