The American University in Cairo’s Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Department hosted the screening of two short films on Sunday night, part of a series sponsored by the Austrian Cultural Forum taking place in Alexandria and Cairo throughout the week.
Sunday’s screening featured two out of the three films in the series: “The Other Side” and “Messages from Paradise # 2.” The opening night showed these two films in addition to “Messages from Paradise # 1,” which included a Q&A session with directors Samuli Schielke, Daniela Swarowsky and Mukhtar Shehata. Another screening on Oct. 21 featured a symposium discussion on the question of whether Europe is, in reality, a “promised paradise.”
“The Other Side,” a short film by Shehata and Schielke, explores the human impulse to cross lines — both invisible and tangible — that divide them. The film focuses on class boundaries and one man’s search for a way to penetrate the physical barriers that define class in one area in Alexandria.
Shot on location in El-Mandara neighborhood of Alexandria, the audience is introduced to two boundaries that define the lives of locals: the Mediterranean Sea that separates Egypt from Europe, and the Abu Qir railway that separates El-Mandara from an adjacent wealthy seaside neighborhood.
For the protagonist, a poor resident of El-Mandara district, the socially-defined boundary represented by the railroad tracks is an inflexible barrier on par with any concrete wall. His predicament is augmented by a cross-track love story that can never work out. When he finally crosses the tracks, however, he finds that new barriers await him. Looking out across the Mediterranean, he wonders despondently if maybe there is someone who shares his problem on the opposite side of the sea who is, too, longing for the other side.
Though just eight minutes long, the film manages to elegantly explore the two boundaries that define the protagonist’s existence and portray the many ways in which human life is defined by longing for the other side of infinite boundaries. One of the film’s co-directors, Shehata, is a resident of the ‘wrong side’ of El-Mandara, and also plays the role of the film’s protagonist; thus the film’s portrayal of the power of the railroad boundary is strikingly realistic and informed by Shehata’s own personal experiences.
Finnish co-director Schielke is an anthropologist by training, a perspective that is clearly discernible in the film’s shots, which are sensitively focused on how the totality of the protagonist’s existence informs his thoughts and actions.
“Messages from Paradise #2” is a work in progress directed by Swarowsky. The second installment in a planned trilogy of films and video installations exploring the theme of longing to be elsewhere, chronicles a fictional dialogue between young people in Morocco and Dutch Moroccans. The 44-minute film captures the constant uncertainty prevailing among those who have stayed and those who have left. The full trilogy, to be completed in 2011, is a critical study of the myths surrounding the immigration experience, explored from the perspective of immigrants and those who long to immigrate.
This second film follows the successful release of “Messages from Paradise #1,” a collaboration with Schielke, which looks at the lives of five young Egyptians eager to leave their country and chronicles their dialogue with first generation Egyptian immigrants living in Vienna. The migrants’ responses to the young Egyptians’ questions about what it is like to “live the dream” of life in Europe reveal the complexities behind the question of leaving one’s homeland, revealing the constant yearning for the “other side” that defines human life.
The two films shown on Sunday evening effectively address the sensitive and controversial topic of immigration and the existential dilemmas that are a necessary result of dislocation and craving to be elsewhere.
The films expose something important about the psychology behind the desire to immigrate: It exists everywhere and is not always solved by movement. The discussion begun by these films deserves to be continued, particularly in a society like Egypt where many of the dilemmas portrayed in the films ring quite true.
“The Other Side” and “Messages from Paradise # 2” will be screened Sunday, Oct. 30 at El-Dokan: 2 Adib Bek Ishaq St., Al-Manshiya, Alexandria. “Messages from Paradise #1” and “The Other Side” will be screened Nov. 1 at the Austrian Cultural Forum Cairo: 1103 Corniche El Nil, Garden City.
