A Different Drummer

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has has an article up making fun of the shambles that was known as the Cairo International Film Festival, and although I had kind of mentally blocked all memories of this trainwreck of a festival, the Haaretz piece inspired me to pile on and have some fun. It was a shambolic, disorganised, random, clusterfuck of a festival, and its smouldering remains should be wrapped in barb wire and shot into the sun.

I had written a big entry about how bad the festival website was and how it was practically impossible to find a proper movie listing - but that is boring administrative stuff, and I deleted it. Just check out the wesbite, try and find the film times and descriptions, and marvel at how awful it is. I will save your time and write more about a particularly memorable film screening that we attended.

Last Thursday night, along with a couple of friends, I went to see the film "Everything", by British director Richard Hawkins. As you can see on the website, the plot of "Everything" is:

"The Palestinian Bashar works as a taxi driver in Los Angeles, but he dreams of becoming an actor in Hollywood. He also entertains the hope of returning back home one day, since he was an actor with Al-Qasaba Theatre in Ramallah. In Los Angeles, a film audition typecasts Bashar to play an Al-Qaeda terrorist role. When Bashar gets home, he realises the utilities are due and he has 24 hours to make the money. For the remaining hours left until tomorrow, an increasing flow of passengers ride in Bashar's taxi ........"

Sounds great. Once the film started (the fact that it started 45 minutes late should be taken for granted and hardly merits a mention), the credits rolled, the film was indeed called "Everything" and it was indeed directed by Richard Hawkins. That is where the similarities ended.

"Everything" is about a strange, lonely, introspective British man who makes repeated visits to a prostitute in London. He just wants to talk, but she wants to screw, so she spends a lot of time taking her clothes off and trying to turn him on, and he spends a lot of time trying to coax her into a game of monopoly or putting the kettle on.

The Cairo Film Festival people had screwed up, and pasted the description of another movie (I did some searching and it is "Driving to Zigzigland" by US director Nicole Ballivian) into the info page for "Everything".

Now this is a considerable screwup, but not a totally fatal one. What magnified the fuckup was that the plot of the "Zigzigland" movie is quite friendly, if not attractive, to a mainstream Egyptian Muslim audience - Palestinians, Ramallah, taxi driving, the evils of US homeland security etc. There was quite a few people in the audience who seemed uncomfortable at the very beginning of the film when a scantily dressed prostitute answers the door, and explains that she "takes it in the mouth, in the arse, and everywhere else". These people were considerably more upset and walked out of the film in numbers about 20 minutes later, when the same prostitute stripped naked, spread her legs and started faux-masturbating, in an effort to tempt the guy into sex.

Not that I have a problem with any of this. Nude touchy touchy prostitutes? Fine by me. But imagine a bunch of dudes showing up to see Mission Impossible 4 and instead getting greeted with the deleted, too hot for cinema scenes from "Brokeback Mountain". They would be disappointed in varying degrees, from "dude lets get out of here" all the way through to righteous demands for refunds, apologies etc.

Now replace "bunch of dudes" with "Egyptian Muslims", replace "Mission Impossible 4" with "a film supposedly about, and sympathetic to, the Palestinian diaspora in America", and replace "too hot for cimema scenes from Brokeback Mountain" with "semi-pornographic arthouse garbage about British prostitutes". I think some fury and disappointment is pretty justified.

Read the whole Haaretz article - this was not an isolated mess-up in an ocean of smooth organisation. It was the norm, rather than the exception. Perhaps Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, who oversaw this joke of a festival and it's multi-million dollar budget, should put more effort into hiring some competent festival management, and less effort into baiting the fundamentalist Muslims, even if the second part is much more fun and gets him the international headlines.....