The director and cast of the Egyptian movie The Blue Elephant, which was a smash-hit at the Egyptian box office during Eid, were in Dubai this week to promote the film's UAE release today.
The movie tells the tale of Dr Yehia (Karim Abdel Aziz), a once-brilliant psychiatrist who reluctantly returns to work after five years as a dropout following the death of his wife and daughter.
He is assigned to a unit for the criminally insane, where he is shocked to discover that one of his first patients is his old college friend Sherif (Khaled El Sawy), who has been sent there for evaluation, having been accused of brutally raping and murdering his own wife.
This sets in motion a journey that raises questions about the very notion of sanity, as well as a quest to solve the mystery of what happened to Sherif’s wife.
Not exactly uplifting Eid family fare, and director Marwen Hamad concedes that the scheduling of the release could have backfired.
“It’s maybe not the perfect timing for such a film,” he says. “As you know, Eid films have a certain type of appetite with a certain type of audience, but we thought about it from a business point of view.
“This is a high-budget film, and, for the box office, Eid is the busiest time of year. It’s always better to compete with the biggest cake, even if that means you come out with a smaller share of a bigger cake.”
As it turned out, the producers’ faith in the movie turned out to be well-placed. “The film started third at the box office at Eid, and I think now we have climbed up to number one in terms of both daily revenue and box office,” says Hamad.
“That was a bit of a surprise. The film is over two-and-a half-hours [long], it’s a genre film – I don’t recall seeing a genre film in the last 20 years in any Arab cinema – but people are reacting to it in a very positive way. The feedback is very strong and we’re drawing audiences from right across the board.
“I always felt the film had that potential. It’s a very engaging film, and any film that successfully engages the audience can be successful – but it’s still very pleasing.”
The film is adapted from a popular novel of the same title by Ahmed Mourad, which has been riding high in the Egyptian bestseller charts since it was first published in 2012.
So Hamad and his team may have had the advantage of a ready-made audience among the fans of the book, but adapting such well-loved source material is not without its own pitfalls.
“The pressure is unbelievable, especially with social media,” he said. “It’s like you’re competing with 100,000 other directors, each with his own cast and his own ideas.
“A lot of people didn’t like my cast at the very beginning, but this actually worked in our favour because it made us really focus, and I think it’s fair to say audiences are very happy with it. Of course, not everybody is going to like your film, but even people who still may have their own ideas have said to us ‘we really like the work you’ve done’.”
Referring to today’s UAE release, Hamad says: “This is a very important market for me – the highest admissions in the region. It’s important for the film to succeed here, and I did have in mind when I was making the film that I wanted to make it appeal to other audiences, not just the Egyptian one.
“If we can reach the Gulf market too, quite simply that gives us more revenue and then bigger budgets later on.”
With the dramatic growth in the UAE market for audiences and producers alike, can we expect to see a future Marwen Hamad film shot here?
“Of course, the chance is always there,” says Hamad. “We’re always looking for collaboration. There’s a lot of opportunities in the UAE and a real passion for film. If the right opportunity came up, I’d certainly take it.”
cnewbould@thenational.ae
