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Cairo International Film Festival 2016: The Other Land, Clash, Mimosas, & More

You can experience the festival from beginning to end without leaving the island of Zamalek.

Cairo International Film Festival: The Other Land, We Are Never Alone, Clash, Kills on Wheels, Mimosas, & More
Photo: Kino Lorber

From the window of an airplane, metropolitan Cairo seems to stretch into infinity, a truly ancient city that keeps adding onto itself, year after year. A handful of cities occupy a greater land area, but fewer appear to be as impossibly intricate and dense, its overwhelming breadth a dreamed thing. The next thing you notice is that Cairo wears its history on its sleeve. Very little fails to carry signification of events and people, past and present. Does your town have a bridge named after an historic date? The river island of Zamalek connects with Tahrir Square and points east using the “6th of October Bridge,” named for a successful show of force against Israeli occupiers in 1967. Even the hotel where most guests of the Cairo International Film Festival stayed, the Cairo Marriott, has thick roots in the 19th century, as related by a short documentary preloaded in each room’s television set, explaining the colocation of a sleek, modern hotel within the 150-year-old Gezirah Palace. The Marriott, by the virtue of its dual structure, symbolizes the city’s relentless, incremental layering of the new upon or within the old, the way a very old cathedral might be built over the ruins of an ancient one.

You can experience the festival from beginning to end without leaving the island of Zamalek, which sits in the Nile River the same way as Roosevelt Island sits lodged between Manhattan and Queens on the East River. A 20-minute walk or—at peak times—a 30-minute drive conveys festival attendees to the Cairo Opera House, where, at each individual screening, you to pass through up to four metal detectors. The cadre of security personnel at each juncture carry out their duties without panic or fuss, occasionally taking a drag off a cigarette or a sip of koshary tea. Breaking up the landscape outside the Opera House is a solitary figure holding an assault rifle and standing at perfect attention for hours on end; in his 100% black outfit, kevlar accoutrements, and totally concealed face, he looks like none other than Kylo Ren from The Force Awakens. One doesn’t talk to him.

Every screening observes assigned seating protocol. When I took my seat for This Life of Mine, the usher led me, with the grave precision of a funeral director, to my exact chosen seat in an auditorium that remained empty but for one other attendee. Dozens of ticket-holders enter any given screening up to half an hour late, the insidious maglights that are now a standard feature on smartphones bathing the room in errant stabs of piercing light, as if they were volunteers combing the woods for a missing child.

Navigating the festival structure was challenging in some ways, simple in others. The tactic employed by festivalgoers in Toronto and elsewhere, of timing a contingency screening in case something goes wrong with your main choice (projection failure, a shutout, a bad film), staggered by a few minutes to allow for travel between venues, has no play in Cairo, where upward of 10 to 12 films start at exactly the same time, four times a day. If, say, the projection for one film fails, which actually happened to me when the correct media files for the 2003 Chinese film Cell Phone went missing, you’re out of luck for anything else playing during the same timeslot, unless you can suppress your inner Alvy Singer and miss the opening 15 or so minutes.

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I’d asked my hosts to recommend an evening film on Saturday, November 19th, from 11 titles sharing that slot, and they picked The Other Land, directed by Ali Edries and starring Muhamed Ali—both of whom are major figures in Egyptian cinema. Movies shown in the Opera House’s main hall invariably had a “gala” feel to them, but The Other Land, as I gathered in retrospect, also happened to be the very film that was being advertised with posters and billboards throughout the festival grounds. I had stumbled quite accidentally into the festival’s main event. Applause greeted the first shot of the star, and, on the whole, the audience behaved with rapt reverence, instead of their usual, WhatsApp-fixated distraction. Had there been an applause meter at The Other Land, you could have pegged the film as a phenomenon as big as Titanic, and, brazenly, the migrant melodrama actually cribs the boat-sinking set piece from James Cameron’s blockbuster, down to the creaking and crashing of the ship’s hull onto hapless swimmers.

Sadly, in spite of good intentions, The Other Land is concocted with a kind of effortless incompetence, with a script consisting almost entirely of shouting and garment-rending. The audience ate it up, leaving me feeling isolated and out of touch, but later I was encouraged by a pan of The Other Land on the Egyptian website Mada, which criticized the film for toadying to the state’s official and less-than-empathetic view of the desperate migrants.

As artistically and emotionally vacant as The Other Land was, the worst film I saw in Cairo also happened to be my first screening, Petr Václav’s agonizing We Are Never Alone. If you aren’t able to sense trouble from the series of screaming matches that make up the film’s opening minutes, the long scene of a hypochondriac father (played by Karl Roden) inspecting his own feces for abnormalities, in close-up, might well drive the point home. A clever filmmaker might have devised We Are Never Alone as a sadistic punishment for intrepid film-festival explorers, but Václav’s film, sort of a Czech Gummo, minus Harmony Korine’s anarchic comic sensibility, still somehow reeks of good, sober intentions gone horribly, horribly wrong. Eschewing even a threadbare plot in favor of a string of miserable vignettes (including a child and his mother, in two different parts of the film, attempting suicide), I might have been able to grudgingly admire Václav saying “fuck you” to the audience, had I not nursed the vague suspicion that I was also supposed to interpret his callousness for bravery, his aimlessness for integrity.

Due to a misheard conversation, I spent many panicked minutes thinking that The Other Land was Egypt’s official submission for the 89th Academy Awards for foreign-language film, until Wikipedia set me on the right path with the more encouraging news that it was Mohamed Diab’s Clash that sought the nomination. Easily the best film I saw at Cairo, Clash makes good on a nifty premise: Tell the story of the 2013 post-coup protests from the inside of an overcrowded police van. It’s to Diab’s great benefit that this obstruction, modeled after Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, hardly ever calls attention to itself.

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The film, a recent-history variation on The Poseidon Adventure, sees its credibility slips when its characters start to resemble a little too succinctly a cross-section of Egyptian society, but more than compensates as a horror film where the beast is the chaos, hopelessness, and mistrust that’s been harvested in the wake of the 2013 coup; think Cloverfield if the monster is us. And when the Stanley Kramer dynamic threatens to be a little too on-the-nose, Diab rights the ship (of fools) by focusing on the ordeal itself, ingeniously pivoting to transform the van from an unjust detention center to the characters’ only safe haven, while outside, there’s only annihilation and madness. At a festival where I could scarcely remember the endings of most films, I’ll be haunted for some time by the entropic dissolution of Clash, its final frame bathed in the sickly green of hundreds of laser pens.

Mirroring Egypt’s recent strife across a 60-year gap, the 1950 Chinese film This Life of Mine might doubly serve as a portent for the American dystopia now in progress. The film, directed by Shi Hui, also goes by Life of a Beijing Policeman, telling the story of the turbulent first half of China’s 20th century as a kind of proto-Forrest Gump. Somehow managing to locate its humble protagonist amid the key ruptures in that country’s social fabric, no matter how inconsequential—and often adverse—his presence may have been, This Life of Mine is certainly not a happy tale, and bravely takes a dim view of each sociopolitical shift, carefully observing the human and spiritual toll in contrast to whatever nominal advances may have otherwise been achieved. While the film has gravity and significance in spades, ultimately that’s all it has. Stifled by its reductive, restrictive soundstage approach and done in by its aimless, episodic structure, transmitting history through monologues and cries of woe, This Life of Mine contains few surprises, save for its unflinching depiction of violence and torture, startling for a film from 1950.

Not exactly a remarkable film concealed by an unremarkable title, the Kosovar-Macedonian melodrama Home Sweet Home nevertheless exudes a quiet discipline and a light touch. Reminding me less of Showtime’s Homeland and more of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s mellow existential fantasy License to Live, the film, directed by Faton Bajraktari, tells of a presumed dead soldier (played by Shkumbin Istrefi) returning home after a long absence, hoping to resume his old life. He finds that not only has the world moved on without him, but that there are real, adverse financial consequences to his “coming back to life.” In short, he’s worth more dead than alive.

Despite the hectoring, darkly comic business the above summary might suggest, Bajraktari plucks no low-hanging fruit. While there’s some very dry comedy in the bizarre indignity suffered by the protagonist, who must hide from prying eyes in his own home, scampering shoelessly from room to room to remain unseen, Home Sweet Home is free of bitterness, as quiet as a Nuri Bilge Ceylan film, and emphasizes above all the ex-soldier’s loving family. It asks for little and acquits itself admirably.

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A concept film of a different stripe than Clash, the Hungarian Kills on Wheels takes a page from the 1984 Cloak & Dagger playbook. While the degree to which the story—two disabled teens who team up with a paraplegic ex-fireman (Szabolcs Thuróczy) to do some crime—is a therapeutic fantasy isn’t fully revealed until the coda, hints are sprinkled liberally throughout. The film earns points for its earnest bid for diversity (the two young stars bring to the film their real-life disabilities: a degenerative spinal condition and cerebral palsy, respectively), without pulling its punches as a crime fantasy.

On the other hand, Kills on Wheels is marred by indecisiveness, playing coy when it should go hard, or trying to solve for uncertainty by filling the void with endless chitchat. Disappointing as film are when they’re unable to answer “and then what?” after laying out their concept, the high point of Kills on Wheels is a McMansion heist wherein the trio are challenged by ostentatious design disasters, like a needlessly curved cobblestone driveway, or an ornate security gate, all while distant police sirens grow louder.

There’s not a champagne flute in sight in or around Mimosas, a Spanish-Moroccan art film of Tarkovsky-esque aspirations, but that omission is the film’s least strange aspect. Directed by Oliver Laxe, who enjoyed a blip on the international radar with 2010’s You Are All Captains, a FIPRESCI prize recipient at the Cannes Critics Week that year, Mimosas labors hard for parable cred, unafraid to let viewers tip off the side of the wagon along its rocky, treacherous path. A story in vague outline: A dying sheikh guides a band of migrants across a hilly landscape. Aware that he’s going to die, his destination is a resting place chosen for its ancient but unclear significance.

Miles away, a young, itinerant laborer, an eccentric misfit given to proselytizing before an audience of apathetic co-workers, is tasked to relieve the beleaguered sheikh. Upon arrival, the youngster shames two would-be thieves into becoming his right-hand men. What ensues, apart from hazardous terrain challenges and murderous, roving bandits, bears not a little resemblance to Gus Van Sant’s 2003 landscape poem Gerry, right down to that film’s atmosphere of despair, indistinguishable from its lyrical abstraction.

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As is the case with every other international film festivals, Cairo sorts its massive catalogue into various panels and sidebars, to ease attendee digestion. This year, apart from its main competition slate, various tributes to luminaries departed or otherwise, and documentary sections, the fest shined its spotlight on new and classic Chinese cinema, Shakespeare on film, as well as a tiny, intriguing group called “Films From Behind the Berlin Wall.” It was out of that section that I took a chance on Solo Sunny, a musical drama co-directed by Konrad Wolf and Wolfgang Kohlhaase, and was glad I did. If there’s one net benefit of attending festivals outside your home city, it’s the experiences that lead you out of your comfort zone, whether that zone is mental or geographical. For cinephiles like myself—who know little about contemporary German cinema apart from Fassbinder or Herzog, and nothing at all about East German cinema—even a film of modest ambitions like Solo Sunny can be a window into a strange world.

Powered by a charismatic lead performance by Renate Krößner, the film is not unlike a rock ‘n’ roll variation on the old Sternberg/Dietrich template, in which a sexually (and musically) empowered woman must fight to keep herself from being hogtied by the greedy men that surround her. Almost incidentally set in East Germany, Solo Sunny casually defies any expectations the viewer might bring that life behind the Iron Curtain was dominated by authoritarian interference and John le Carré-style skullduggery. Instead, the film illuminates the daily drudgery of life with a traveling variety act—sort of an Almost Famous without the childlike wonderment.

Grounded in the cement, leather, and lipstick of everyday life, mixed with the mild bed-hopping reminiscent of any number of 1970s sex comedies, Solo Sunny walks a careful line between the banality and the thrill of personal independence. Not unlike Nomi Malone at the end of Showgirls, Sunny’s choice to go solo means losing everything, but winning herself. In a festival that boasted no shortage of politically significant narratives, this personal story from a country that no longer exists overpowered them all.

The Cairo International Film Festival ran from November 15 —24.

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This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Jaime N. Christley

Jaime N. Christley's writing has also appeared in the Village Voice.

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