The Diff film poll focuses on reality but misses the funny and fantastic

The poll of the top 100 films of Arab cinema highlights a dramatic cinema record of eight decades in the Middle East, but misses some crucial aspects

Editorial Illustration for Dec.14/13 paper

weekend eye

When Dubai International Film Festival (Diff) announced its plans to conduct a wide-ranging poll to determine the greatest Arab films of all time, a number of results were all but certain to materialise. Egypt, home of the oldest and biggest film industry in the Arab world, would dominate the list (it provided 47 of the 104 films on the list), Egyptian filmmaker Chadi Abdel Salam’s only movie, The Mummy (1969) (aka The Night Of Counting the Years) would win the number one position by a considerable margin and recent productions would figure heavily in the list.

The poll was conducted to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Diff, a festival that changed the landscape of Arab cinema. Its generous monetary awards, different grants and nurturing of talents have spawned an entire new generation of Arab filmmakers hungry to tell their personal stories.

It also encouraged other festivals in the Gulf region, namely Doha and Abu Dhabi, to follow the same path and thus expanded the available platforms for Arab filmmakers. As a the result, Arab cinema witnessed a notable rise in production over the past 10 years, which consequently led to a boost in participation in major international festivals.

Young fans of Arab film who most likely identify our cinema with Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now, 2005), Nadine Labaki (Caramel, 2007) or even Haifaa Al-Mansour (Wadjda, 2012) will be stunned by the rich history of the cinemas in Tunisia, Morocco, Palestine, Algeria, Syria, and of course, Egypt.

Every decade since the inception of Egyptian cinema is represented in the poll – one film from the 1930s, another from the 1940s, six from the 1950s, nine from the 1960s, 20 from the 1970s, 21 from the 1980s and 1990s, and 26 from the new century.

Nearly all great Arab filmmakers are represented in the list, Youssef Chahine, Salah Abouseif, Mohamed Malas, Elia Suleiman, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, Moufida Tlatli and several others.

Various acknowledged masterpieces are there: Chahine’s Cairo Station and Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronicles of the Years of Ember, alongside little known gems such as the first Arabian Gulf movie, Khalid Al Siddiq’s Cruel Sea, and Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory, the first Palestinian movie filmed on both sides of the green line.

Yet aside from Anwar Wagdi’s star-studded Egyptian musical comedy, The Flirtations of the Girls (1949), no straightforward genre pic managed to make the cut. Critics and artists have decided to ignore the great Egyptian comedies from the 1940s and 1950s and the Lebanese musicals of the 1960s in favour of serious dramas that highlight different facets of the Arab reality.

Many films from across the board share the same themes – the effect of totalitarian rule, the subjection of women, the perils of religious fundamentalism, the thwarting of individual freedoms, the ailments of sexual repression and the disintegration of Arab unity. The picture these films paint is of interconnected societies sharing same predicaments, challenges and dark histories – patriarchal cultures that continue to suffer from corruption, abuse of power and religious tyranny.

Thus, the movies of the poll function as an exhaustive historical record of the Arab world for nearly eight decades, covering diverse monumental events that took place during that period.

There’s the aftermath of Arab-Israeli War (Adrift on the Nile, 1971), Anwar Sadat’s catastrophic economic open-door policy (The Bus Driver, 1982), the Lebanese civil war (West Beirut, 1998), the Palestinian nakba (The Time That Remains, 2009) and the American invasion of Iraq (Son of Babylon, 2009).

Most films envelop their political critiques inside the guise of social dramas; many resorts to symbolism and some use allegory.

A few of these films had been initially banned on release – Youssef Chahine’s The Sparrow in 1972 for his scathing condemnation of the government, Atef El Tayeb’s The Innocent in 1986 for his attack on the corrupt Egyptian police and Omar Amerlay’s Everyday Life in a Syrian Village for his disparaging of the Ba’ath party’s hollow slogans.

Morocco is a peculiar case. Boasting one of the most exciting film scenes, its budding cinema almost always steered away from direct confrontation with politics. A number of recent films such as Casanegra (2008) and In Casablanca, Angels Don’t Fly have dabbled with social injustice and the escalation of violence; yet almost none has dared to touch the king or the ruling family.

Yet perhaps it’s the largely overlooked Arab films that dabble in different terrains from politics that makes the Dubai list an excellent vehicle for discovery.

Chief among this faction are the brilliant works of Tunisian filmmaker Nacer Khemir whose The Dove’s Lost Necklace (1991) present philosophical mediations on Arab history, existence and love.

There’s also The Water-Carrier is Dead (1981), Egyptian neo-realism godfather Salah Abou-Seif’s bold study of death, and Al Yazerli, Iraqi filmmaker Al-Zubaidi’s shocking manifesto on sex and desire.

The poll is the first of its kind in the Arab world – a grand and highly ambitious project documented in the newly released book, Cinema of Passion, in which 20 of the foremost Arab film critics discuss the 104 films. In attempting to draw an objective picture of Arab film history, the poll organisers have asked 475 filmmakers, film critics, academics, producers, visual artists, novelists and poets to name their top 10 films. The poll, and the book, offers a great introduction to Arab cinema – possibly the most accessible introduction there is to date. Yet it’s certainly not the definitive statement on Arab cinema, and there are major question marks regarding some of the movies that were voted for.

Many observers were shocked to see numerous landmarks of Arab cinema shut out from the list – El Madina (Egypt, 1999), Trances (Morocco, 1981) and The Ambassadors (Tunisia, 1977) to a new a few. Similarly, Palestinian maverick, Rachird Mashharawi, and the king of Arab comedy, Fatin Abdel Wahab, from Egypt strangely had no works represented in the list.

By contrast, several recent films received with mixed or largely tepid reception by Arab critics were voted in by a number of voters. This notorious group includes Khaled Youssef’s exploitative melodrama, Heena Maysara (2007) from Egypt, Nadine Labaki’s simplistic, tonally dissonant civil war comedy, Where Do We Go Now (2011) from Lebanon and Annemarie Jacir’s blatant, sensationalistic Salt of this Sea (2008) from Palestine.

Other new productions such as Ahmad Abdallah’s Microphone (2010) from Egypt, or the much-discussed Wadjda (the first Saudi film by female filmmaker) are excellent pictures that, nonetheless, are yet to prove their classic status.

But the poll is, first and foremost, a reflection of the Arab film culture, and what it clearly demonstrates is that younger voters are quite ignorant of Arab film history, or, to be more accurate, of the film histories of neighbouring Arab nations.

The profusion of productions, the growing interest in Arab cinema and the emergence of new voices from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan could herald this decade as a new golden age for Arab cinema – a rich, productive era that will surely lead to revisiting the forgotten, divergent and unpredictable history of Arab cinema. The Dubai poll is just the start.

Joseph Fahim is a Cairo-based film critic and lecturer. He is the Chief Programmer of the Cairo International Film Festival and the English editor of Dubai International Film Festival’s newly released Cinema of Passion