CAIRO: Tamer Ezzat suddenly realized that most of his family and friends have immigrated or are thinking about leaving the country. An uncle in New Zealand; a cousin in the United States and another in Canada are but a few examples.
Stepping out and looking at the bigger picture, he realized his case is not unique but rather a prevalent phenomenon among friends and acquaintances. Later research further confirmed his belief.
The idea that a lot of people want to permanently leave their country of origin means that they are looking for something else and they want to belong somewhere else; they want to settle somewhere else, Ezzat concludes.
Let s go back to the basic question, he says. Where is the place that you feel at home? And that was how I started thinking about the film.
After a year of research, interviews, filming and editing associated with a necessary search for funds, Ezzat, the film s director, was standing in the corner of a packed hall in El Sakia as people flocked to watch his documentary The Place I Call Home.
Shown as part of the Euro-Arab Film Caravan, the film follows a group of four Egyptians toying with the idea of immigration. They are a combination of somebody going away, somebody [who] is thinking, somebody wants to stay [and] somebody coming in.
But the film is not necessarily about immigration, notes Ezzat. It tries to find out an answer to the question of ‘the meaning of home’ through ideas of those who are trying to immigrate.
The film doesn t stop there. As it follows its four main characters, Miriam, Sebaei, Moataz and Hams, the film surveys a variety of local concerns such as economic stability, the sense of security, emotional ordeals and the characters journey of self-discovery.
Hams El Gabry, an Egyptian who spent most of her life abroad, talked about her perception of the country and the character changes she has gone through. But participating in the film was also educational for her.
In one scene, the director decided to make his four main characters meet and discuss their problems. Coming from different backgrounds, they all had different perspectives. Listening to others problems, El Gabry realized how lucky she is.
Also through the film, El Gabry adds, she realized that she can t change the society she is in and its negative aspects.
The one-hour documentary required 50 hours of footage and seven months of editing. But the film, unlike the local perception of documentaries, has fewer interviews and more drama.
Ezzat, who studied digital special effects at the Center for Advanced Digital Applications at New York University and film directing at the New York Film Academy, was captivated by the realistic documentaries he saw during his stay in the Big Apple. It was the first time he’d paid for a ticket to watch a documentary.
All was new to me. For an hour and a half I was watching something that was completely and utterly mesmerizing, he said.
He followed suit in the making of his own documentaries. Instead of depending solely on interviews, Ezzat made sure to have cameras accessible around the clock, so whenever any of his characters had an interesting event he would go and film it. Even in the short documentaries he made for Orbit TV, he made sure the visuals were as interesting as the social topics he covered.
Like fictional dramas, his documentary has a narrative, with obstacles and problem solving. Human lives have conflict, he explains.
But this wasn t something that Ezzat got the hang of the first time around. He acknowledges how the participation of scriptwriter Nadine Shams in The Place made the film s structure and narrative much better than it had been.
Everything is Gonna Be Alright follows the lives of four Egyptians living in post 9/11 New York. It is a personal take on the ongoing events from a social perspective.
Shams, a feature-length scriptwriter, says the special type of this documentary is a sort of docu-drama, as she calls it. The challenge was coming up with a sequence of scenes in which the four stories would be woven together with smooth transitions. According to Shams, there were nine versions of the film s structure, each with its own logic.
But like all independent filmmaking, funding was a concern. In Everything, Ezzat paid for the filming costs in New York and was able to get SEMAT, a production company working with independent filmmakers, to fund the editing and distribution processes.
Like the structure of his films, his luck also got better in The Place. He applied for a UNESCO program and was accepted as one of eight independent filmmakers around the world. The organization would supply the money and he would be responsible for the creative process.
There was supervision and it was great supervision, Ezzat explains, recalling the constructive critique he got from the organization. Ezzat also contributed with 25 percent of the film s budget.
He is currently looking for a distributor, reminding himself of the lessons he learned from his experience with Everything. Printing the film on tape is not enough, he says, You have to advertise it and you need funding.
But funding is not the only obstacle facing Ezzat and other documentary directors; he describes the current situation as the stone age of documentaries. One of his objectives is to fight stereotypes about the genre.
Due to a long-held tradition in state TV of showing documentaries about historical monuments in a slow paced boring structure, audiences now believe all offerings of the genre are just as boring. According to Ezzat, people expect the films to be short.
Regardless of the obstacles and stereotypes, Ezzat remains loyal to the genre. He insists that his plan to enter the mainstream as a long-feature director – he is currently looking for a suitable script – doesn’t mean he will end his career as documentary director.
This is what I want to do, he explains, Make a feature, then take a break, then make a realistic documentary then prepare for another movie and so on.
His work as a film editor is a great boost to his prospective career. Ezzat has worked with big names in both features and documentaries. He edited Youssef Chahine s Sekout Hansour (Silence we are Rolling) and Yousry Nasrallah s El Medina (The City). He has also worked with acclaimed documentary director Atyat El Abnoudy and Mohamed Khan on a number of documentaries.
For more information, e-mail the director at [email protected].
