Cairo Caravan fails to draw audiences similar to Alexandria’s
CAIRO: After two weeks of purely intellectual festivities, the Fourth Caravan of the Euro-Arab Cinema finally came to an end last Tuesday in Cairo. The film festival, initially scheduled for Amman and Beirut, was met with mixed success, unlike Alexandria’s Caravan. In fact, it was the Caravan’s unexpected success in Alexandria that encouraged the Artistic Creativity Center in Cairo to extend it for another week – however, film enthusiasts didn t show up until the last days of the festival and, overall, attendance wasn t as large as it had been in Alexandria. Nevertheless, the entire Caravan, despite the timing and other constraints, was a success.
The Cairo Caravan was divided into two parts: a collection of recent Lebanese documentaries and a film tribute to the late Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski, marking the 10th anniversary of his death. The Lebanese documentaries were mostly below average and saw some walkouts and general public dissatisfaction.
Take Mohammed El-Soueid s Civil War, for example; the film examines the inexplicable death of a middle-aged Lebanese B actor and the many contradictions of modern Lebanon. The narration is built on a series of interviews with his family members and friends. The idea of the film sounds promising at the beginning; the problem is none of the actor s acquaintances seem to know him thoroughly and the actor himself, despite his tragic death, doesn t appear to be a very interesting personality. Moreover, El-Soueid s look at contemporary Lebanon is restricted to a petty juxtaposition of lingerie stores and footage of some of the country s female singers with Lebanon s alleyways and the people that inhabit them. In the end, the film, largely due to a lack of substantial material and bad choice of an unexpressive subject matter, ends up saying nothing about either Lebanon or its ordinary citizens.
The worst film of the bunch, however, was Akram Zaatri s In That House. The short documentary watches the filmmaker and his assistants trying to dig up a letter that had been left in a house by Ali, a member of a Lebanese resistance group, to the residents of the house, explaining why he had turned it into a war operation room.
Astonishingly, the film is composed of nothing more than a man digging to retrieve this letter. Zaatri s men finally succeed in finding the letter that ultimately says nothing more than what Ali explained in the beginning of the film. In That House is a pretentious, self-important, vain, hollow project about an inconsequential subject and as a result received the worst reception of all the films shown in the festival.
Zaatri s other film was the sole revelation from the Lebanese documentary cannon. Her & Him: Van Leo observes Zaatri finding a nude photo of his grandmother taken by a photographer named Van Leo in Cairo. Zaatri decides to travel to Cairo and meet up with him to reveal, through the eyes of the old photographer, a vanished beautiful city and an entirely non-existent world. Van Leo tells Zaatri how numerous young ladies were willing to be photographed nude as they regarded it as a renowned art form and a celebration of youth and beauty. Photography was regarded as a superior form of art and Egyptians were fond of having their pictures taken out of their appreciation of the art and their desire to take part in it. The Egypt of Van Leo was different than the one we inhabit now; it was a country where art wasn t considered a luxury but rather a popular feature of life, where religion wasn t the dominant force controlling all aspects of life and, most of all, when it was genuinely great to be living in such a society.
The highlight of the Caravan though was the Kieslowski s retrospective. Kieslowski is not only considered the greatest filmmaker to emerge from post-communism Eastern Europe, but one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. The center of the Kieslowski s retrospective was the 10 part film series The Decalogue.
Considered by many critics as his towering masterpiece, each part of The Decalogue is based on one of the Ten Commandants and is primarily set in a Warsaw apartment complex. The Decalogue films aren t religious parables; it is essentially a dramatization of fundamental rules in a complex age where nothing is fundamental. The Decalogue is also a collection of stories of ordinary people facing unusual daily conflicts that force them to make firm moral choices without compromise. Most of all, however, the series is about life, the search for God and meaning, the attempt to create a human connection with one another, the somberness that reflects our existence and reality and the glimpses of hope and happiness we all frantically search for.
It s hard to choose a favorite film of the 10 or overlook any episode. Kieslowski used a different cinematographer for each episode to create a distinct visual style for each one of them. Kieslowski s greatness is illustrated not only through his exceptional storytelling, but through the images and symbols that populate his films. One particular young man appears in a majority of the films; this man seems to know the characters of each story and their secrets. He simply watches them without passing judgment. This man represents Kieslowski who, as an artist, is the God of his work He knows the past and future of these people yet he can t interfere. All he can do is watch them and hope they make the right choices.
Watching The Decalogue was a unique cinematic and spiritual experience. Kieslowski was not a mere artist or film director; he was a thinker, a philosopher and a poet who understood more than most people what it means to be human.
After The Decalogue, Kieslowski set to create his final, and most famous, masterwork: ‘The Three Colors Trilogy. The trilogy, based on the colors of the French flag, is another dramatization of the meaning of each of these colors. Each film of the trilogy is a great work of its own; but, seen together, the films form a coherent picture unlike anything released in the medium s long history.
Blue, the only part of the trilogy to be screened in the Caravan, was the film that brought Kieslowski worldwide recognition and contained, arguably, the best screen performance of the last two decades. The film features Juliette Binoche s unflinching portrayal of a grief stricken woman who loses her husband and daughter in a car accident and her attempts to flee her reality by withdrawing from her world and leaving all her possessions, friends and former life behind. Binoche doesn t show any external sentiment, her anguish is involuntary suppressed as her character fails to express it through normal behavior. Her getaway is soon marred by a friend of her husband and the disclosure of his past. The film is extremely moving, painful to watch at some points and unbelievably real in its emotions.
The Fourth Caravan of the Euro-Arab Cinema is the last cultural event of the summer season in Cairo. Serious film fans will have to wait until next November for the cultural activities to kick in. For those of you who can t wait that long, the Ismailia International Documentary Film Festival and the Alexandria International Film Festival will be held in a couple of weeks. Those unable to travel that far can always turn to cable TV, the Internet and Ebay.
