Talents behind Egypt’s post-naksa films
By Mohssen Arishie-The Egyptian Gazette
Saturday, July 31, 2010 02:12:02 PM
CAIRO--Despite the gloom, despondency and frustration it caused at home, the defeat of the Egyptian Army by Israel in 1967 opened a new vista for young filmmakers at the time.
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| A scene from the Egyptian political thriller "Al Karnak" based on the novel by Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz. |
The defeat inspired a long line of talented film directors, novelists and scriptwriters, who were about to graduate from cinema and drama institutes in the country.
Traumatised students in the film direction section, prominent among them being Khairi Bishara, Daoud Abdel-Sid and Ali Badrakhan, had to change their minds about their graduation projects and focus on the
naksa (setback) instead.
An interesting study recently published in the local Al-Mousawar magazine also revealed that the nation’s leaders, convinced that cinema could do much to ease the nation’s trauma over the defeat, gave firm instructions to the censors not to be too fussy about the contents of films made after the naksa.
The defeated leaders also gave the green light to film directors who made movies which sought to shift the blame for the setback
to others in the ruling inner circle.
In the event, these films definitely acted as a catharsis, allowing the nation to release its frustration, raising the public’s battered morale, encouraging them to rise up and celebrate a new, imminent dawn.
These movies are popular until today, with scholars and film critics describing them as ‘classics of Egyptian cinema’.
The film Sarsara Fouq el-Nil (Chatting on the Nile), based on the novel written by Egypt’s Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, is widely regarded as the best of them.
Sarsara Fouq el-Nil is a thoughtful analysis of the reasons for the collapse of the Egyptian Army in the Six Day War.
Surprisingly, Mahfouz wrote the novel two years before hostilities erupted on the Egyptian-Israeli border in Sinai.
The action happens onboard a Nile boathouse, whose owner, an actor who has to compromise his talent by playing sleazy roles, flings open the door for his self-interested colleagues to come and enjoy themselves
with their girlfriends and whores.
Many of the revellers in the boathouse are professional or amateur members of the intelligentsia.
Like their prostitutes and girlfriends, these hashish-smoking, whiskydrinking men feel that they have been done an injustice by a society, which refuses to acknowledge their talents.
The owner’s semiconscious guests recover when the radio blares out that the Egyptian Army has been defeated.
Sarsara Fouq el-Nil condemns the intelligentsia of the 1960s, who allegedly played a passive role, at the expense of
their nation.
Unlike Sarsara Fouq el-Nil, Al-Karnak, another post-1967 setback film, was made to condemn the leadership of late President Gamal Abdel-Nasser and his chief of intelligence, General Salah Nasr.
General Nasr, whose founded Egyptian Intelligence, was imprisoned after he was found guilty of torturing opponents of the Egyptian Revolution.
His victims were mainly communists and members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
It must be said that Al-Karnak was produced in 1974, under the leadership of President Nasser’s successor, late President Anwar Sadat.
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