28 November 2008

Interview

CAIRO: "I was a musician before becoming an actor." Ezzat Abou Ouf, president of the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF), pauses to sip some Turkish coffee. "Back in the '70s, I was one of the revolutionaries changing the face of Egyptian music - our oriental, typical one-line-going type of music - to a Western style. I used drums for the first time, bass guitars, guitars, saxophones. It was a taboo and I started getting all the curses in the world in the newspapers.

"But the music you're hearing now, it's not Egyptian anymore, unfortunately. Unfortunately. Except for the language of the lyrics, you'll never be able to differentiate between the tunes, the harmonies, the chords. I won't say Westernized but ... globalized.

"So I don't think we'll be still having the movies like we used to produce in Egypt, like Salah Abou Seif's 'The Stories of Naguib Mahfouz' - these Egyptian alleys, Egyptian problems. I don't know ... but I think in the future, [most Egyptian cinema] will be globalized."

Abou Ouf laughs. "I've just made a very dangerous confession to you."

The 60-year-old was appointed CIFF's president a couple of months before the 2006 festival. Since then he's been the public face of a venerable film festival - whose 32nd edition is currently running in the Egyptian capital - that's in the process of remaking itself.

The son of an Egyptian Army officer with a penchant for oriental music, Abou Ouf studied medicine (and ran a gynecological practice for five years) while working as a musician. For 12 years the front man of the 1980s band The 4M Group, he also co-hosted the on-air talk show "Cairo Today" (Al-Qahira al-Youm). He acted in his first film in 1992.

"There was a very serious defect in the years before I [became CIFF president]," he says. "Our artists, our stars didn't care to come to their festival. I consider this festival to be very important for us, not only for Egypt but in the Middle East, so this annoyed me a lot.

"They lost interest. Then I started thinking, 'You know, artists are like small babies. They want fireworks and some colors and some nice dresses and a nice red carpet, a good party after the ceremony, interesting movies to show them. I gave them that, and it worked.

"Then it became important to build from the inside ... With the help of Madame Soheir Abd al-Qadir, my vice president, we put a system that can run on its own for years to come."

The reforms are too many to detail, says Abou Ouf, but he depicts a system in which there is a clear division of labor among the festival's several committees, all independent of him, and accountability.

The major local factor observers point to when discussing CIFF's reform is the state's decision to relieve the Ministry of Culture of its financial and administrative responsibilities for the festival, turning instead to corporate sponsors. In the last couple of years, Egyptian telecoms magnate Naguib Sawiris and Mohamed Nossair's holding company, the Alkan Group, have been cited as major patrons.

The major external force in compelling the festival to undertake organizational changes has been the rise of competitive new film festivals, particularly in the rival Emirati city-states of Dubai and Abu Dhabi - which launched film festivals in 2004 and 2007, respectively.

"I consider CIFF to be a father figure to these young festivals," says Abou Ouf. "This is a good sign. First of all, I think that competition is very important. If we don't have competition, you stand still, you won't be eager to do better, to have better movies, better stars, a better system, better organization.

"The thing that I dislike about this is that they're very near to each other. Why don't we spread them throughout the year? We cannot change because we are ... one of 11 festivals that have their own rules and they can't change anything. For instance, so may people asked me, 'Why don't you have [CIFF] in Sharm El-Sheikh?' We cannot. It's the Cairo Film Festival."

For a festival wanting to represent itself as the most important in the Arab world, however, there are downsides to competition. With several festivals sharing the same (small) stable of Arabic-language cinema, and with each wanting to host the world premier (or at least the regional premier) of significant new films, the festival with the strongest financial muscle has a distinct advantage.

"I hate to say this," Abou Ouf says, "but we must not forget that Egypt is the only country in the Middle East that has a real cinema industry, for the last 75 years. You can't compete with that. You can't compete with Egyptian stars, with Egyptian cinema-makers, you can't compete with the history of the cinema, you can't compete with the industry. You can make a very good party, very expensive, very well organized, beautiful, but ... for what?"

In lieu of a strong local audience or cinema culture, one of the ways that festivals like Dubai's have sought to become global cinema players is to develop the institutions of Euro-American-style film markets - where Arab directors and producers can mingle with investors and buyers, local and otherwise. For outsiders, CIFF's co-production market apparatus seem opaque by comparison.

"The festival market [was] one of the things that stopped, which I worked to get back. My predecessors stopped it because of the competition of the television, which has a very strong market. So they said 'Okay, we'll stop doing our market because ...  it's not fair.'

"Last year I suggested we start from scratch. Unfortunately it stopped for exactly the same reason: The Media Festival is exactly at the same time as [CIFF]. So I decided, there's no need for us to compete. After all we're one country, one people, one aim ... The next year, I went to minister to try to change the dates of the festival. He couldn't and we can't. So I said we might as well bring back the market ...

"The day before yesterday I met with the head of this big Kuwaiti film production company. I've told him, let's go sit with [Egyptian stars] Yousra [and] Leila Alwi, and start to brainstorm. But it's still one-by-one. I think we have the means but we must wait awhile until the producers and artists are used to the idea, until they start trusting each other, and start trusting the market itself - trust that we can do this on a fair basis without selling them to a Kuwaiti producer, or that the Kuwaiti producer can invest without someone taking his money and running away."

At times, it seems Egyptian cinema veterans' strong confidence in their long tradition has created a culture of insularity and suspicion of outsiders.

"You can say that," says Abou Ouf after a moment. "It's not mistrust. It's something new. They never thought about it before and aren't used to it ... 'Why should I go outside? I'll stay like I am in my system with my producers with a system I know, where they give me 20 percent first when I sign and 20 percent.' This needs to change, of course, if we want to catch up with the future. And I'm trying to put this old image in a spoonful of sugar, you know, but slowly. I trust that step-by-step is the best way to proceed."

Given that the Egyptian filmmaker who is best known outside Egypt - the late Youssef Chahine, to whom this edition of CIFF is dedicated - made the lion's share of his films via international co-production, it seems ironic that the international market doesn't have more of a toe-hold in Egypt.

"Chahine was the only one who followed this line," nods Abou Ouf "We had marvelous producers ... very good, all of them but they didn't have the mentality, they didn't have this way of thinking. Chahine had it. That's why he succeeded ... Well, some youngsters are trying to come out and do the same thing, Yousri Nasrallah for instance, but he was really clever and had connections. To follow his steps is very important and to generalize this concept among cinema-makers in Egypt."

The cinema language that audiences associate with the best Egyptian film reflects a compact between local filmmakers and their local audience. It seems pertinent to wonder how the face of "Egyptian cinema" as it is presently understood will be changed after its postponed appointment with globalization.

"I was just watching a movie made in 2007, a [remake] of [Doug Liman's 2002 blockbuster] 'Bourne Identity,'" Abou Ouf pauses. "Amazing. They've really started to develop global standards in cinematography, acting, thinking ... Before no one would ever be convinced of a story of a hitman losing his memory being a hero. This was unacceptable in our society. It must be a story about so-and-so wanting to marry such-and-such and the mother not wanting to and so on.

"This is really a fruit of looking over to the world - in a very primitive way, of course, but if we can do it ... the way it's supposed to be done, I think it's really gonna change."

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.