The Closed Doors: Exposing the Taboo

Atef Hetata's controversial Egyptian film The Closed Doors (Al Abwab Al Moghlaka) marks a moment in Egyptian cinema where the nation began to more openly acknowledge its tense cultural and religious problems, particulalry those concerning sexuality. The film follows the story of 13-year-old Mohamed, known as Hamada to his mother, as he comes of age and battles with urges he's been taught are wrong and the unsettling idea of his mother as a sexual being.

The film opens with an eye peering through a hole in a wall. The audience soon sees that the eye is gazing at a group of girls. As the image continues to grow, we see a young boy, Hamada, distracted in class by the passing girls. His teacher is quick to reprimend him and remind him that he is at school, not at the movies. Hamada is thrown out of class and after closing the classroom door behind him, he is approached by another teacher and told to go to the mosque to escape the hardships of school. Hamada sets off on a walk through his neighborhood, and images of an impoverished Cairo provide the backdrop for the film credits.

Before the credits roll, The Closed Doors, has already given audiences a lot to consider. The image of an eye through a hole in a wall suggests a voyeuristic quality to the film. The camera both stares back at the eye and assumes the eye's vantage point, thus building a twofold relationship between the eye's beholder and the audience. First, the audience is gazing at Hamada, observing and judging him. Next, the audience becomes Hamada, joining in his curiousity of the female form and seeing the world as his inexperienced eyes see it. This relationship persists throughout the film.

Next, there is the remark from the teacher, that this is a class, not a cinema. For Hamada, it is a class pretending to be a cinema, but for the audience, this is a cinema acting as a class. Hamada is being taught literature and writing, but not the things he wants to learn: sex and sexuality. For that, he uses his symbolic cinema in the form of the hole in the wall.

On the other hand, the audience comes to the cinema to experience the sensuality and pleasure of seeing images on the screen. There is a fascinating satisfaction gained from viewing human bodies, particularly beautiful bodies, on the theater screen. This is why movie stars are pressured to be so picture-perfect. However, The Closed Doors closes the door, in a manner of speaking, on this saught-after satisfaction and instead turns every image of beauty and sexuality into one of tension and discomfort. The human body is feared and uncertain in The Closed Doors, for this is the way Hamada interprets it.

Finally, in the opening sequence, Hamada closes the door behind him when he leaves his class. This act seperates him from the boys and teacher inside the room and leaves a void for another door to fill. When one door closes, another opens. In this case, the next door opens towards religion. Hamada closes the door on his education and takes another step towards the door to Islam. And this is where we meet him at the start of the film, and from this point on Hamada will bounce back and forth in his beliefs, struggling with his growing sexuality that has changed his perception of the world.

One way to read through The Closed Doors is to examine the role of doors, both literal and metaphorical. There are in fact many doors in the film that dictate the fate of Hamada and his mother.

As a metaphor, the door is an in-between place and a barrier. It can be used to hide behind or block others out, or it can be removed to bring people together. It can be the threshold for something great, or something devastating.

In that respect, the characters are constantly situated near doors in the home or at school or even car doors. The doors serve as either a separation between two types of people--man and woman, mother and son--or as a barrier to keep things hidden and safe.

For example, when Hamada accidently sees his mother changing in her room, he quickly closes the door to protect himself from seeing her and to protect her from being seen. The door is being used to hide and protect his mother, but at the same time, it was by accidently opening the door that Hamada caught a glimpse of her undressed. The door is neither friend nor foe for Hamada and it is clear that no door remains closed forever.

For the film itself, the door it opens is the one blocking any public discourse on sexual practices or issues, such as incest or extra-marital sex, both of which are major elements of The Closed Doors. Hetata opens the door with a shocking and riveting drama that is rich with metaphors and yet tragic in its realism.

Lemon Tree: Solitude in the Middle East

Eran Riklis's most recent film, Lemon Tree (Etz Limon), is a collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian creative forces that observes the strained relationship between these two peoples.

Salma (Hiam Abbass) is a widow who lives for her lemon grove, which she tends to with the help of her friend Abu Hussam (Tarik Kopty). However, after the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Navon (Doron Tavory) and his wife move in next door, her grove is declared a security risk and most be uprooted. Salma hires young lawyer Ziad (Ali Suliman) to sue the Israeli government for the right to keep her lemons.

The film is based on a true story and tackles the touchy subject of Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes. Riklis isn't new to controversy, having directed the critically acclaimed film The Syrian Bride (2004) about a family living in the disputed territory of the Golan Heights.

Riklis claimed that Lemon Tree would be his last say on the matter, so to speak, regarding the Middle East conflict. He definitely plays it safe in the film with characters that are all victims, and yet all villains at the same time. They are all wrong and all correct, with perhaps the exception of Salma, who is the innocent doe trapped in the midst of brutality.

Instead of pointing blame, Riklis rather contemplates the notion of loneliness. All his characters are lonely, having either built walls around themselves (both figuratively and literally) or had walls involuntarily built around them.

Salma lives alone with her lemon grove. A widow, her children are too busy or too far away and strict cultural tradition forbids her from associating with men, as demonstrated by the character Abu Kamal (Makram Khoury).

Her counterpart would be Mira, the wife of the Defense Minister. After moving to the border with her husband, she is left at home while he works, surrounded by guards and hardly able to look out her window without an official escort.

Over time, Mira learns to pity and empathize with Salma. Although the two only meet once and speak only a few words to each other, an unlikely bond forms between the two women, both bound by restrictions and loneliness.

Salma does not win her case, but the judge amends the orders so that only half her trees are chopped down. As Ziad points out, this is actually a great victory since it is the first time an Arab suing the Israeli government has managed to change anything at all. She may be a hero to all Palestinians fighting to keep their land and homes, but the stark image of a half- barren lemon grove feels more like the glass is half empty, not half full.

The Defense Minister himself is unaware of his loneliess, convincing himself throughout the film that he is justified to order the descruction of the lemon grove and ignoring the warning signs of his wife's growing isolation. By the end of the film, he is more alone than any other character: his wife has left him and the wall he was eager to have built around his home blocks any visitors, intruders or any signs of life.

So who is to blame for this perpetual unhappiness? It would be easiest to try and blame the Defense Minister, but was he not simply doing the job assigned to him? Salma seems like the most obvious victim, but her reluctance to compromise or negotiated is matched only by the Israeli government.

As it were, the biggest culprit here is a collective failure to communicate. It is as if Riklis wants us to acknowledge the suffering of all parties involved, from the hapless and young soldier keeping watch over the lemon grove to the widow about to lose her entire livelihood, as though these are all equal forms of suffering so that there is no right or wrong side to the conflict.

Frankly, this is a higly political and safe stance to assume. While at first it seems Riklis is being bold and controversial, Lemon Tree proves to be less explosive and more meager.

This is not to say Riklis has not made a good point. His characters have gotten so caught up in a history's worth of conflict and failed diplomacy that they have forgotten how to simply speak to each other. Indeed, the volatile Palestinian-Israeli confict could do with a mediator or two, but Lemon Tree only points out this fact and does not try and offer a solution.

In regard to aesthetics, Lemon Tree has Riklis's familiar romantic-realist style filled with long takes, location shooting and topped with a dreamy quality that laces certain scenes, such as in the court room where the camera revolves slowly to capture the poetic words of Abu Hussam.

Photo Caption: L to R Tarik Copty, Hiam Abbass and Ali Suliman in Lemon Tree

Photo courtesy of lemontreemovie.com

Paradise Now Part 2: Self-Reflexivity

In my last post on Paradise Now, I argued that Abu-Assad had given a voice to a previously silent character, the terrorist. The story comments in many ways on the current political crisis in the Middle East, but the film is also a self-reflexive work that comments on cinema and media as they operates in the Middle East.

The most indicative scene is where Said and Suha discuss cinema over tea at her home. Suha asks Said if he likes movies and he responds by saying that Nablus does not have a movie theater, and the only theater he has ever been to was one he help set on fire. This dialogue helps establish two important points about the perception of cinema in the West Bank.

First, cinema is not accessible to Palestinians due to lack of infrastructure. Said does mention that movies are available on tape in Nablus, but the experience of watching a film in a theater is relatively foreign to him. Cinema is, perhaps, a foreign art form to Palestine. By setting a movie theater on fire, Said destroys not just a building but a symbol of something foreign and imperialistic. It is possible to deduce that Said's destruction of the theater reflects a larger rejection by the Palestinian people of cinema as a whole.

Nonetheless, media does exist in Nablus. Two scenes in the film take place at a video store that rents out tapes of suicide bombers' final messages and the confessions of collaborators before they are killed. In this way, media has become incorporated with the conflict. Suha is shocked and disgusted by these video rentals, though she does not know that Said himself had recorded his own video hours before.

The idea of taping these messages is to make them immortal, so that the stories of the terrorists and collaborators will live on. The videos also help to distribute the messages to a large audience. These two points are also goals for cinema as a whole: to make stories eternal and to distribute them to a mass audience. But in this case, videos are manipulated for political purposes and exploitation. This is not to say that certain cinemas, such as Hollywood, do not have political agendas or exploit for a profit. In fact, many theorists would say all Hollywood films have some form of agenda, and mainstream films have profited from exploiting people and situations for as long as cinema has existed. The only difference is that the video rental store is straightforward in its purpose and uses all real people. The videos achieve the same end as cinema but without the seductive illusion created from cinema magic.

Going back to Said and Suha's initial conversation, there comes a point where Said is also unable to name a genre of film he enjoys. He asks Suha if a "boring" genre exists, since that is what his life is like. Said feels that no current genre of film relates to his life or is fit to tell his story. Indeed, perhaps no genre or style of cinema in existence is suited to tell the Palestinian narrative and become part of the developing Palestinian cinema.

While Abu-Assad may be reflecting on cinema's failure to attract or accurately portray Palestinians, he is himself attempting to construct a Palestinian cinematic identity. Paradise Now is painfully aware of its task at hand.

In the end, Said and Suha can come to no conclusion about Said's interest in film. She, being born and raised outside of the West Bank, is too removed from the situation in Palestine to understand his apathy towards cinema. Their conversation eventually escalates to a debate about how to fight the occupation and the two realize they do not see eye to eye, and arguing is futile.

In addition to its address of the Middle East conflict, Paradise Now meditates on the role, if any, of cinema and media in Palestine as it attempts to construct a Palestinian style to make cinema an effective art form in telling the Palestinian narrative.

Paradise Now: Voice for the Voiceless

No discussion of contemporary Arab cinema would be complete without analysis of Hany Abu-Assad's Golden Globe-winning and Academy Award-nominated film Paradise Now. This film represents a huge artistic and financial success for Arab cinema, and investigating the reasons why it attained such success reveals many great possibilities for the region. It was popular and grossed fairly well both within the Middle East and abroad, enjoying a long run in American theaters as well. It's success at film festivals and award shows helped put Middle Eastern cinema on the map and solidified it as a viable competitor in the global film market.

All of this success is especially shocking considering the film follows the point of view of two would-be suicide bombers--a perspective not typically shown and one that most audiences are reluctant to empathize with.

A film's protagonist is by nature someone for audiences to empathize and connect with. Without a relatable protagonist, a film cannot go very far. This has created a certain understanding with audiences so that before a film even begins, they know they are about to embark on a journey with the protagonist, and by the end of the film should feel more connected to the character. So for a terrorist to be given such powerful access to people's hearts is a bold and unexpected accomplishment.

But by taking this risk, Abu-Assad humanized a character that is often relegated to being portrayed as a loud, obnoxious, and unintelligent background character whose purpose is only to be "taken down" by the film's hero (Think the Libyan terrorists in Back to the Future, or Salim Abu Aziz in True Lies).

In comparison to past Hollywood terrorists, Khaled (Ali Suliman) and Said (Kais Nashif) in Paradise Now are a huge departure from the hegemonic stereotype. The two are childhood friends who, aside from their radicalism, lead very normal lives--or as normal as they can as Palestinians in the West Bank.

Khaled has trouble holding onto a job, Said fights with his younger brother, and their families are constantly looking for better and cheaper water filters. These are all seemingly trivial and mundane elements of everyday life, but Abu-Assad intentionally highlights these things to humanize his characters before introducing any indication of terrorism.

When the two men are finally approached for their mission, the focus of the film always remains on their personal struggle in going through with the attack. Islam is mentioned in the film as merely a fact of radicalism, not the source or motivation for it. Khaled and Said's family history and personal experiences are the things that have led them to violence.

While Abu-Assad was careful to portray terrorist activities in an accurate fashion, going so far as to have militants supervise a scene where the men record their farewell messages on video, this realism only contextualizes the characters. Paradise Now is a purely character-driven narrative that delves into the psyche of the two terrorists.

What emerges is desperation, confusion, and identity crisis. As Khaled says, they are dead if they stay alive or go through with the attack, indicating a severe desperation. The two seem to have lost a will to live but still have a will to resist, raising an interesting paradox in extremism.

To challenge these beliefs is the character of Suha (Lubna Azabal). She is a Palestinian born in Morrocco, educated in France and now returned to her parent's hometown. It is revealed that she is the daughter of a famous martyr, though she resents the glory her father received and takes a decidedly pro-peace and pro-diplomacy stance. In a memorable conversation with Khaled, Suha claims that there is no paradise; it exists only in their heads. In response, Khaled says that he would rather have paradise in his head than live in hell on Earth.

Abu-Assad uncovers the humanism behind radicalism in Palestine. There is no clear message in Paradise Now and I do not believe Abu-Assad is trying to preach to his audiences. Rather, he is educating them and giving a voice to the voiceless. Abu-Assad has complicated the Western stereotype of the uneducated and unkempt religious fanatic that has allowed Hollywood to vilify Arabs without any remorse.

Paradise Now trailer:


Photo Caption: Said (Kais Nashif) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) wait patiently to carry out a suicide bombing in Paradise Now.

A Man in Our House: Nationalism in Egyptian Cinema

I would like to look at another Henry Barakat (Days and Nights) movie, the 1961 film A Man in Our House (Fi Baitina Rajul) starring Omar Sharif. Like Days and Nights, A Man in Our House features a love story that is threatened by social and political elements beyond the lovers' control and ultimately reinforces traditional morals. However, A Man in Our House features a prominent political message concerning nationalism and patriotism and glorifies the Egyptian resistance to British colonialism, which ended in 1954.

Sharif is Ibrahim Hamdy, a young Egyptian university student and revolutionary who assassinates the prime minister as part of the struggle for freedom. Ibrahim hides from the police by taking refuge in the home of an apolitical fellow student, Mohie, and his family, who risk their own safety to help him.

The father of the family must battle with his obligation to keep his family safe and his sense of duty to his country to protect Ibrahim. He ultimately decides to take in Ibrahim, who quickly becomes another member of the family and an honored guest. A romance emerges between Mohie’s sister, Nawal, and Ibrahim, though Ibrahim tries to reject his feelings because he feels guilty for putting the family in danger.

Their plan is severely threatened when Mohie’s cousin, Abdel Hamid, accidentally discovers Ibrahim. He blackmails the family by threatening to expose their secret if they do not approve of his marriage proposal to the eldest sister, Samia.

Barakat weaves together the political and personal in his narrative. The family’s troubles are also the country’s problems and Sharif’s roles are both an uninvited guest and a wanted felon. This suggests that every Egyptian, even the most apolitical family, is a member of the struggle against colonialism.

Ibrahim's arrival to the house represents an interruption of daily life. The family is forced to examine their role in the revolution and decide what side they are going to take. He is the stranger entering the personal sphere and during his visit, he leaves an impression on everyone in the house.

The film also takes place during Ramadan, a fact that is often mentioned by the characters, and religious morals play a large part in the story. In Days and Nights, religion was almost non-existent. By making Islam so prevalent in A Man in Our House, Barakat makes his film a more uniquely Egyptian work. Themes of resistance and revolution are nothing new in cinema, so by inserting elements of everyday Egyptian life, such as religion, Barakat marks his film as a nationalist work.

A Man in Our House does not spend much time providing context for the events taking place. Indeed, the film was made in the middle of the Gamal Abdel Nasser years in Egypt and the Egyptian revolution was still fresh in people's memories. Barakat overtly embraces Nasser's theory of Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism and observes how these affect the average person trying to lead a normal life.

As also demonstrated in Day and Nights, subtlety is not Barakat's strong point. His middle-class-influenced moral and political messages are made very clear in the film's characters. The Egyptian police are seen abusing and mistreating political prisoners, nearly torturing Mohie to death. The fact that Abdel Hamid is uneducated, having dropped out of college, is repeatedly referenced when discussing his rudeness and immorality.

Essentially, Barakat suggests that a good person is also a nationalist. Resistence is the greatest virtue in the film, so much so that Ibrahim's romance with Nawal is sacrificed for freedom and Ibrahim becomes a martyr for his cause.

Just as Egypt fought to free itself from British colonials, Egyptian cinema struggled to create its own identity separate from Hollywood and other Western cinema. This decolonization of cinema is a problem that persists throughout the Middle East and is just as much an issue today as it was immediately following the Egyptian revolution. As stated in my last post, Palestinian director Elia Suleiman employs a blend of black humor and absurdity to reflect Palestinian reality and this style contributes to the development of a national cinema. This week, we see that Barakat calls upon religion and Egyptian middle-class morals to distinguish his cinema and represent basic elements of everyday life.

This question of national identity in cinema is one I will address more in the future. However, it is clear that the story of a physical resistance in A Man in our House creates the opportunity for artistic and psychological resistance to colonized art.

Divine Intervention: Humor as Resistance

This week, I wanted to build from the last post on Chronicle of a Disappearance to discuss another Elia Suleiman film: Divine Intervention.

Released in 2002, Divine Intervention was Palestine's official entry for the Academy Awards. However, the film was rejected because the Oscars only consider films from countries recognized as a nation by the United Nations, which Palestine was not. This would later be contradicted when Hany Abu-Assad's film Paradise Now is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006.

Much like Chronicle of a Disappearance, Divine Intervention is composed of a series of short vignettes of the everyday life of Palestinians. It is a surreal black comedy that frequently switches between fantasy and reality.

Scenes are as simple as a long take of a man opening his mail in the morning, to an elaborate sequence involving a red balloon with Yasser Arafat's face on it inexplicably inflating and floating across the border.

Suleiman continuously pulls his audience in many directions, and the rapid shifts in tone and style are often humorous, but in a strange and nonsensical way.

In the films climax, a group of Israeli soldiers are doing target practice with cardboard cutouts of Arab woman. After shooting two rounds in a choreographed dance routine, one of the cutouts comes alive. This "Arab ninja" repels bullets, flings stones at rapid speed, and conjures up a shield in the shape of Israel and Palestinian territories, which she uses to destroy a helicopter after taking out the entire group of soldiers.

This represents the daydream quality of Divine Intervention. Suleiman's forays into the surreal are moments of wishful thinking, such as the "Arab ninja" who single handily takes down soldiers without any guns or sophisticated weaponry. Suleiman captures the spirit of Palestinian resistance to occupation through fantasy and surrealism.

This leads to the greater question of cinematic resistance in an occupied region. Suleiman is a Palestinian-Israeli and his films are made in both Israel and Palestine. So would his film be considered part of Israeli cinema or Palestinian cinema? Arguments can be made for both, however, it is generally accepted that Divine Intervention is clearly a work of Palestinian cinema because of its subject-matter, director, and actors (most of whom are non-professional and are friends or family of Suleiman).

For me, what makes Divine Intervention a Palestinian film is its cinematic style. Suleiman combines low-budget techniques, such as long-takes and amateur actors, with special effects to create his absurdist vision of reality. There are infinite interpretations of each of the vignette's possible political or social meaning, but the bottom line is that Suleiman is trying to make us laugh.

In an interview, Suleiman says that his inspiration for his films are small things that make him laugh. He takes these simple things, such as a story of his lead actress (Manal Khader) ignoring the commands of Israeli soldiers and just walking past a checkpoint to get into Jerusalem for a lunch date, and amplifies them to the status of the impossible. She reenacts this story in the film , but Suleiman pushes reality into fantasy, and with a glance from her piercing eyes, the soldiers' watch tower topples as she struts past.

The humor in this scene is understated and dark. There is no dialogue, no jokes, and no physical humor. The humor exists in the very notion of a Palestinian woman developing unseen powers to take down a checkpoint. In a country where being Palestinian is a disadvantage and some would say relegates a person to the status of second-class citizen, Suleiman's retelling of Manal's story is painfully wishful.

But Suleiman does this not just to tease Palestinians or indulge escapism. The comedic tone and surrealism of Divine Intervention make it a more digestible reading of the Palestinian situation in Israel and seemingly less bold or agitating. However, Suleiman never loses sight of the social and political issues that shape Palestinian lifestyles and his stories are rooted in this reality. Thus, it is through humor that Suleiman appeals to human emotion to tell stories and give insight into the Palestinian situation.

Divine Intervention theatrical trailer:

Photo Caption: Director Elia Suleiman holds a red balloon with Yasser Arafat's face in Divine Intervention.

Chronicle of a Disappearance: Avante-Garde Palestine

So far, the films I have been discussing are, more or less, part of popular cinema. Some, such as Rana's Wedding, exhibit strong elements of art-cinema, though it still follows a traditional narrative format. In contrast, Elia Suleiman's first feature film, Chronicle of Disappearance (1996), is experimental and abstract in its representation of daily life in Nazareth.

Suleiman directs and stars in this non-narrative examination of a man (Suleiman as himself) who returns to Nazareth after a self-imposed exile in New York. The film is on a quest to discover what it is like to be Palestinian.

The film is segmented into three parts, composed of vignettes of everyday life. Some stories are decidedly incongruous and abstract, while others are more straight-forward in their message. It is hard to classify Chronicle of a Disappearance, as it transcends any notions of genre or plot. It is part fiction and part autobiographical, blending truth and fantasy in hope of uncovering meaning.

The camera rarely moves throughout the film, which is composed mostly of long takes. The audience gets a medium or long shot perspective of any given scene and only sees it from one vantage point; the film is virtually devoid of close-ups. This distances the audience from what takes place on screen and creates a sense of voyeurism.

Some critics have described it as a black comedy because of its nihilistic tone set amongst humorous short tales. I would agree with this label and add that it is a minimalist film in its visual style and cinematography and a psychological drama in its content. The film is best approached by trying to analyze and decipher its parts first, and then synthesizing them to uncover Suleiman's overall message, if there is one at all.

Each scene in Chronicle of a Disappearance is richly symbolic, contributing to the film's absurdity. For example, a wooden camel figurine falls down in a Palestinian-owned souvenir shop in Nazareth. The store owner keeps trying to set it back upright, only for the camel to fall down repeatedly. He leaves for a moment and returns with some tape to prop up the camel, though after he walks out of the frame again, it falls down once more and the scene is over.

This scene can be correctly interpreted for simply what it is--merely a moment in the banal existence of a shop owner who never gets any customers--or it can be read through a metaphorical lens. The camel falling down is a problem for the shop owner that keeps occurring again and again, a metaphor for the problems facing Palestinians generation after generation. By trying to use tape to prop up the camel, the shop owner is using what he thinks is a quick and clever solution for his problem. However, the audience sees the camel fall down again, proving that the problem lies in the camel itself and needs more than a "band-aid" fix.

The film was made following the signing of the Oslo Accords, an agreement signed by Israel and the PLO in 1993 that established the Palestinian Authority, but left out many key issues in the conflict to be addressed at a later time (for more information on the Oslo Accords click here). In light of this historical context, the camel scene can be read as a criticism of the superficiality of the Oslo Accords and its inability to address many of the long-standing issues concerning Palestine.

Of course there is nothing explicit in the camel scene to suggest this is the correct reading, which is one of the more frustrating aspects of Chronicle of a Disappearance. Audiences watch a film expecting to gain some sort of meaning and enlightenment by the end of it, but with Chronicles of a Disappearance, Suleiman betrays this long-standing agreement between film and spectator, and we feel just as lost and unsatisfied by the end of the film as we did when it first began.

Perhaps this was an attempt to reflect the loss and disappointment of the Palestinian people. On the other hand, it could be a comment on the futility of defining Palestinians, or maybe simply the futility of life as a Palestinian.

Suleiman's experimental style is appropriate when applied to his subject-matter: the absurdity and nihilism of Palestinian reality. He forgoes traditional film techniques and creates a cinematic grammar unique to Palestine, which he continues in his next feature film, Divine Intervention, released in 2002.

Without a doubt, Suleiman is the shining example of the avante-garde operating in the Middle East.


Photo Courtesy of Arab Film Distribution