Invisible Ghosts from a Scriptwriter’s Present

Mohamed Solaiman Abdelmalek on Plot Twists, Echo Boomers and Naguib Mahfouz

(Mohamed Solaiman Abdelmalek – photo credit: Amr Salama)

We need to talk about Ramadan and TV land

Ramadan season is usually the main course for filmmakers, scriptwriters and actors. The biggest production companies in the business fight for time slots, optimal screen time and stars face the greatest exposure to the largest number of audiences. The key gameplayer in Ramadan TV series season is Egypt; however, Arab countries such as Syria, Lebanon and Kuwait make notable contribution to the TV-sphere. Despite that, Arab stars strive to appear in one or two Egyptian TV series. Most of them consider the Egyptian audience to be the major target which they intend to seek exposure to.

Why the long intro? My guest today is a prolific writer; one whose life -apart from the job- has been a series of long-term travels and escapades in the murky waters of writing. He started since he was studying medicine in college by writing series of thriller/suspense YA fiction novels. His aim was to explore himself as a scriptwriter and provoke the sense of security and normalcy that most Arab audiences seek. By writing a historical fantasy series of novel rooted in Pharaonic Egypt, he made his landmark as a literary writer, branching out to writing for TV and enjoying the medium with all the limitations and astrophysical lack of sophistication that it provides.

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The Unsaid/ The Other

Female Monstrosity, Menstruation and Feminine Awakening in Film

The female character has been depicted throughout the history of cinema in the form of various tropes. The “Other” woman, ever since the time of the female vamp has been always a challenge; used in the stark comparison to the good girl image; the doting wife, the female role model and the female archetype of beauty vs. ugliness, madness or evilness. Women have always been depicted in the “Otherly” autre form whether through traditional religious scripture which then transcended to the early forms of art.

The female body has been handled with care for many years either through glorifying its sexuality or playing on its vulnerability. In a teenage flick like “The Breakfast Club” the two female protagonists –the beautiful, pampered Claire and the introverted, outcast Allison– are pitted against each other, with the Claire model significantly winning over Allison’s, when the latter takes after the more “accepted” feminine, Claire-like model to gain the admiration and romantic interest from the handsome athlete Andrew. In a very uncomfortable scene in the eponymous “Carrie – 1976”, menstruation and reaching womanhood are associated with acquiring supernatural powers. Blood is used as a symbol of both empowerment and alienation for our female protagonist. In the scene where a repressed Carrie discovers menstruation for the first time could be seen in parallel with the scene where the bucket of pig blood is thrown from high above down on her as she receives her prom queen title. She is dethroned in the most demeaning, humiliating way, and her initial discomfort with blood is linked to the emergence of her femininity as a sign of bodily maturation.

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Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson – The Power of Holding Back

When a filmmaker prefers to withhold key messages from viewers, it is usually a great way to engage the audience in interpretation, trying to decipher the undecipherable. After watching Jim Jarmusch’s latest poetic masterpiece Paterson, the power of revelation is contextualized within the poems that the main character Paterson writes during his long, routine rides as a bus driver. He takes the same route every day, meets a bunch of new –or familiar – faces and reminisces on his life and the chance encounters he makes. His life seems to be monotonous, redundant from a superficial standpoint. But digging deeper through analyzing the text a.k.a Paterson’s poems, the viewer is involved in the experience of the film, not as a passive bystander but more of a pinnacle of the action taking place onscreen.

Paterson is a man who holds back emotions. He’s a decent person, the only breadwinner of the house, living with his wife; a live-in artist who is probably slightly agoraphobic and somehow infected with the art-for-art gene which convinced her to stay home and wait for the inspiration to hit.

While she stays at home trying to figure out whether she wants to become a country singer, a cup cake maker or a painter; Paterson got out there making the art through his mundane route, driving the bus in the same route he goes through every single day, without showing irritability or complaint.

The audience wonders if Paterson is really alive or simply living. He doesn’t seem irritated by anything, not when his wife orders a guitar when apparently they struggle financially, not when Marvin the dog eats his entire poetry collection, or when he takes a bite off his wife’s pie which he clearly does not enjoy eating.

“Paterson” is not a movie to be watched once. The viewer slowly chews their way through it; and begins to realize things they haven’t had a chance to pay attention to throughout the first sitting. The power of Paterson lies in the poems. If the protagonist hides everything he actually feels behind a smile and a gesture of peace, composed and stiff body language, his poetry is a minefield for interpretations and symbolism.

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Selim Mourad was one of the friendliest faces I’ve encountered during the 38th edition of the Cairo International Film Festival. His energy, oozing with excitement and awe at the city –Cairo, the capital of Egypt- didn’t mirror the heavy subject matter which he chose for his first long documentary This Little Father Obsession which translated –impressively- into a different Arabic title The Austrian Emperor. The Arabic title was derived from a scene where the father comments on the son not having kids –because of his homosexuality- with a casualness that could be implying more than it intended; that he was not the Austrian Emperor, so why should anybody care whether he had children.

Mourad made a personal film that documented a transitional stage in his life, as well as his family’s. He was just coming out to his family when they had to sell the ancient family home for money to survive. So there was an act of creation and another of destruction; where did a 28-year-old gay Lebanese man find his footing?

“I hate labels. I can’t be saying that I am making a “gay” movie. It is a film where the director happens to be gay. My family history is the main plotline through which my sexual identity happens to contribute to the course of action.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3nrnB5Uvqk

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The Family: Dementia Review

A Valencian Family Drama that Defies Storytelling in Color

It was a pleasure during the 38th edition of Cairo International Film Festival to get a chance to sit down with Valencian director Giovanna Ribes to talk about her film The Family: Dementia. This powerful drama paints the deterioration of a man’s memory and behavior against the backdrop of familial tension. One of the greater aspects of the film is how Ribes allowed her male characters to show vulnerability as opposed to their female counterparts, who have more composed actions. Three generations of men come to interact in a well-planned narrative with a scratchy, rough style influenced by neo-realism that contains artistic, magical realist interjections.

The grandfather Roger –played brilliantly by Pep Cortés- suffers from dementia. He ages amongst family members who struggle to accept him as he is while his memory slips away. The most sympathetic –and adorably clueless- is the grandson Roger and he is the only one who succeeds in taking the old man for who he is. Ribes takes us into the heart of a real family. Her narrative is inspired by reality. To her, art has no impact if it is not personal. Ribes’ drive to become a director didn’t turn out to be as easy as I thought. In my eyes, it would be really easy for her to become an artist. Her sensitivity shone through her clever eyes and her compassionate gestures. Through her words, the process was gradual:

“I belonged to a family of circus performers and bullfighters. They were artists in that sense. Growing up, I was tired of the discussions and the arguments which their lifestyle generated. I just wanted to be normal.”

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Brady Romberg to FilFan.com: Fractured bones don’t make up painful memories

Brady Romberg is your average stuntman. On a busy year, he gets 50-60 jobs. In some films, he does work that the actor didn’t get the slightest chance of doing. In the NBC hit TV series “Grimm 2011”, he got to be the monster while the actor didn’t wear the monster props at all. Brady suffers a few fractures now and then. Some break his back but most certainly not his backbone.

Brady handled the stunt performance business like the physics engineer he was. He studied the stunt market and when he realized he could make more money doing stunts than engineering he planned out how he wanted to approach it. He made up his mind in the very beginning that despite looking the way he did –pretty handsome, A-list star material- he wasn’t keen on becoming an actor when he could be a stuntman and make more money than most career actors and have a more exciting job at the same time.

“As long as you’re not a celebrity, being a stuntman pays better than most acting gigs,” the 32-year-old Colorado-native says, “and you can easily make a good name in the stunt business in shorter time. As an actor, you’d have to work 10 years until you start getting the jobs you wanted. In the beginning you would be getting almost no jobs, where you just show up on set and prep yourself until the star comes and then you’re out.”

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Mystic Bliss: Janine Canan’s Mysterious Skin

Janine Canan’s Mysterious Bliss

On her newest poetry collection “Mystic Bliss”, Janine Canan continues to shine through her dedication to Earth –and my humble self, on my signed copy only- her reflections on life, the self, the damage done to women and how they can rise above.

The collection is bilingually translated to German, which mirrors Canan’s devotion to a pan-cultural presence, and a more solid sense of self through her universal meditation on women, God and humanity.

In her sharp, abrupt use of imagery, Canan’s language seems heavily influenced by the Dickinsonian style. Canan is not generous with her words. She uses the shortest form of the written verse to express the meaning she tries to convey. Her meanings, profound as they are, carry the syntax which she masterfully desires. The abundance of layers makes up for the more intentional themes viewed as unfavorable forwardness in some poems such as “Prayer” and Streams”.

Canan’s poems vary from simple, mundane expressions of monotone feelings “Sorrow”, “Stages of Woman”, “Mirror” to the more mysterious ones, laden with complex meanings and oozing with thousand methods for deciphering the subtext. Among those that shine is “Consciousness” in which she ends the poem with a bang;

before we know

we are god

There’s also the emotionally-charged “Headless” which is a testament to the violence women face on a daily basis, or “Idiot’s guide to survival” which mourns the destruction of Earth by the hands of men.

Despite the eerie feelings Canan’s poetry could evoke in you, she always ends on a high note. Like a prophetess her message was not to be a warner, but a herald of glad tidings onto people who will listen to her. So listen closely to what she has to say, for her words would definitely be

inscribed on your soul

in lasting Light

Janine Canan’s Mysterious Bliss is available here.