03 December 2007

CAIRO: How do you evaluate the quality of an Arab film? It's a less straightforward question than it seems.

For starters, there is a dizzying variety of tastes in the cinema made in the region extending from Morocco to Iraq. It's also in the nature of filmmaking hereabouts that funding, production and technical expertise are ever more likely to be hybrid, with Europeans playing a particularly prominent role. Add to this the number of films made by expatriate Arabs, and the question of what criteria should be used in judging "Arab cinema" becomes vexing indeed.

The man confronting these issues at the 2007 edition of the Cairo International Film Festival is Moroccan filmmaker Ahmed al-Maanouni, the president of this year's Arab Film Competition. A 30-year veteran of the industry, he captured the attention of Western cineastes when the World Cinema Foundation (the brainchild of American film icon Martin Scorsese) selected Maanouni's 1982 film "Trances" as the first it would restore, before screening it at Cannes earlier this year.

A documentary, "Trances" examines a group of sufi-inspired musicians who took century-old poetry and music and adapted it to contemporary Moroccan realities, refashioning them into a uniquely modern form that resonated for the country's youth.

"The foundation has given this 26-year-old film a new life," says Maanouni, laughing. "I wish I could be so restored."

The writer and director says he comes to the job of jury chief looking for a miracle, the miracle of a film that takes possession of him from beginning to end. "There are as many criteria for assessing a film as there are jury members," he says. "These depend on the jury members' artistic experiences, the way they see the world and a dozen other factors. It's a chemistry. It's my job to make the best chemistry possible, to make a good wine, if you like."

Like so many Arab filmmakers, Maanouni began his career aspiring to the neorealist ideal of working with non-professional actors to render an image of life that is as true as possible. "The truer the image, character, scenario," he explains, "the better the chance that the film will find a universality.

"There are two wrong ways to make films. First, there are those who think that universality simply means copying the pacing and technique of Western film - gangster films, love stories and so on - but with local locations and characters. Mimicry.

"The other wrong way is for the filmmaker to say: 'I want to make something for my audience - Egyptian, Lebanese, Moroccan - alone.' Unfortunately that usually results in bad, artless film with no aesthetic value," he says. "It's fake, like gilded furniture, film for consumer society, made by parvenus who think that gilded objects represent 'beauty,' that many colors without harmony makes 'variety,' that a series of bad jokes is 'humor.'

"I'm still uncertain about the 'right way.' If your characters are in a village, then you must truly root them in that locality. The more rooted you are, the more likely you are to tap a language of pain and longing and humor that a viewer can appreciate.

"My new film - 'Al-Koloub al-Mouhtariqua (Burned Hearts)' - for instance, is set in [the Moroccan city of] Fez," he says. "Such location choices are never innocent. I must work my dialogue

so that it reflects this locality.

The main character is an ironsmith so he must not only look like an ironsmith but have the [imagination] of one - the music he listens to, his relationships with those around him. It's a microscopic vision of his reality magnified to make it believable for the audience."

An adept of the Moroccan film scene, Maanouni is equally comfortable discussing everything from the grassroots of artistic production to the business of international filmmaking and local consumption - the decline of local cinemas. The discussion sheds some light on his criteria for judging film.

"We are starting to build a film industry in Morocco. In the early days, we were like lonesome cowboys, each trying to do everything himself - writing, direction, cinematography," he says. "Now, 20 years later, we have developed good technical skills, but the filmmaking chain is still broken.

"Technicians, camera operators, sound men, we have. The main gap is in scriptwriting. We have a rich heritage of storytelling and written literature, of course, but the technical skill of dramaturgy is still underdeveloped. This slows us down. If you turn on your TV, everything you see is a copy of everything else.

"Another break in the chain is," he adds, "cultural - the people who must hold up a light to the work and raise the level of the discourse. Sometimes I'm ashamed to go into a movie house and see how people respond to film. People must be taught to appreciate art.

"This is natural. American cinema began with slapstick - a man falls over and another man falls over him and both are chased down the street by policemen. It's not funny but people laughed. Then, little by little, the level was elevated. What I notice in the Arab world is we're still at the slapstick level.

"Our societies are quite conformist," he continues. "We don't have the freedom to simply be human beings. When I see how audiences respond to a bit of flesh on the screen it makes me want to weep.

"This is why we need scriptwriters - we need to return to the educators, so we can raise the level of artistic appreciation. People appreciate art naturally, but tastes must be cultivated. Without this, we cannot appreciate the beauty in the things that surround us and we risk lapsing into barbarism."

Remarkably, Maanouni says he's never had to work with a European co-producer and so can't speak about its impact on his own work. "I do notice, though, that the films that are co-produced with European countries tend to be of a certain type," he says. "Europe sees the Arab world through certain spectacles - women, religion, democracy, etc.

"When European agencies choose to support a particular Arab scripts, these reflect the European vision. That's why these films all look alike. It's not that there's some kind of plot against Arab cinema. Europeans simply like stories that conform to their views.

"Our views aren't necessarily any different," he argues. "The stories should simply be told our way. If we simply give back the Europeans' vision of our world, then we don't share anything. There must be an exchange. When you come to a party, you must bring something with you."

Over the last few years the cultural press in this region has helped forge a narrative of competition among the Middle East and North Africa's "big three" film festivals: Marrakesh, Cairo and Dubai. It's a notion fed by both a spell of organizational listlessness at the Cairo event and Dubai Inc.'s decision to devote its ample resources to creating not only a high-octane film festival but also a foreign film-production industry to rival that of Morocco - a drive decisively echoed this year when its sister state of Abu Dhabi inaugurated its own festival project.

As president of the Cairo festival's competition jury for Arab film - and with "Burned Hearts" having its world premier at the Dubai festival next week - the Moroccan filmmaker is uniquely positioned to respond to this competition-driven view. He dismisses it as wrong-headed. "We need more festivals in the Arab world," he says. "To have more high-profile festivals isn't to detract from the prestige of those we already have. In Europe, there are dozens of film festivals, each with its own personality, each adding to the wealth of our cinema heritage. To view this patrimony as a cake that must be cut into pieces is reductive.

"There should be 10 times more film festivals in the Arab world. They must arise from a true passion for cinema, run by film-lovers devoted to presenting these works with the respect they deserve - not to serving tourism or some other business agenda. Of course, fringe benefits arise from cultivating a passion for cinema. But if you start with these other benefits and make cinema secondary, don't call it a film festival. The more festivals we share, the more tastes we can share."

The Cairo International Film Festival continues through December 7. For more information, please check out www.cairofilmfest.org