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Asfour discusses the state of Arab cinema. Taking into account the various crippling limitations facing Arab filmmakers, it is surprising that films get made at all.

John Malkovich is not a fan of contemporary Arab cinema. That much is clear from an article he wrote for The New York Times last January. Malkovich, who was invited to preside over the jury at the 1998 Cairo International Film Festival, berated a number of the films that screened there, with particular disdain for one Egyptian and one Syrian film. Then, he concluded: "Roughly two-thirds of the way through our film marathon, I had long since taken to my 'bed' in the screening room.. relieving my tedium by lying on the floor."

To write off Malkovich's reaction as that of a Westerner who has little understanding of or appreciation for Middle Eastern culture would be easy. But the truth is that for the past thirty years, Arab cinema has been stagnant. Arab filmmakers themselves agree with the American actor. In a long-overdue effort, representatives from eleven Middle Eastern countries-Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Syria-gathered last November to share their concerns over the future of Arab cinema.

Saudi Arabia's Saleh Fawzan, UAE director Nujoom Al Ghanem, and Omani director Dr. Khalid Al Ziddjali stated that none of their countries had anything close to a film industry to speak of. Kuwaiti director Khalid Al Siddiq called his country "under-developed" where cinema is concerned. Iraqi director Farooq Saloom said that his country's cinema has been hit by sanctions since 1990. And the Palestinian Elia Suleiman, whose 1996 debut feature Chronicle of A Disappearance is one of the more refreshingly daring films to be borne out of the Middle East in recent years, had the audacity-and the courage-to admit that he hadn't watched many Arabic movies and didn't like the ones he saw.

Taking into account the various crippling limitations facing Arab filmmakers, it is surprising that films get made at all. In interviews I have done over the past few years with Suleiman and other Arab filmmakers, they have talked at length about their artistic and political challenges.

"We have a huge catastrophe in terms of industry," says Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah, whose latest film El Medina (The Village) was selected for this year's New Directors/New Films series at MOMA. These days, even Egypt, that bastion of Arab cinema, is unable to hold its head above water. Recently, the number of domestic productions has dramatically shriveled-- from over sixty films a year in the 1960s to a little over a dozen a year today-and even those are being pushed out of theaters by American imports. "All of our strikes to formulate laws to develop funds and to organize cost-efficient marketing strategies went unanswered," says Nasrallah, who has been an active member of the film movement since the age of seventeen. Currently, he is planning, along with a few other Egyptian directors, to open a project space that screens non-American films. "Surely there are people with money in Egypt interested in showing Egyptian films," he says.

Nasrallah began his cinematic career cowriting scripts for the much celebrated Youssef Chahine. In the early Eighties, the young director broke away on his own but, like Chahine, he has tackled themes that are uncommon to commercial Arab cinema. The clash between East and West is the focal point of El Medina, which was cowritten with French director Claire Denis (Beau Travail). Nasrallah's video camera follows young, handsome Ali from the colorful, chaotic, and jam-packed streets of Rod-El-- Farag-the small Egyptian town where Ali lives-to the desolate, destitute, and industrial suburbs of Paris, where Ali has come in search of an acting career, and back again to the rambunctious streets of Rod-El-Farag to which Ali has returned after he has lost his memory.

Asked if he decided to shoot El Medina primarily on video for esthetic reasons-- since Egypt is one of the few Arab countries to offer fully-equipped film studios and technologically-advanced equipment-Nasrallah replies, disheartened: "The only reason I used video was because I was poor. I knew it will never look like 35mm, but I had to find ways to make it work."

It appears that he didn't make it work enough. When we spoke last March, he had still not been able to find an Egyptian theater to screen El Medina, even though it had won the Special Jury Award at the Locarno film festival. Meanwhile, the film had already found distribution in Switzerland, Germany, and France.

Throughout his career, the West has been kinder to Nasrallah. His other films, Summer Thefts (1998), Mercedes (1993), and the documentary On Boys, Girls and The Veil (1995) were shown in international festivals and opened in Europe. In contrast, they had short runs in Egypt. El Medina's $4.5-million budget was provided almost entirely by the Montecinemaverita Foundation, an independent European organization, which aims to assist film production in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. "As Arab filmmakers we have nothing at all in terms of financial backing," Nasrallah says, "but what can we expect when we live in countries run by dictators who have intense disdain for culture and who have especially no interest in a medium like cinema, which is based on valorizing culture."

For now, Nasrallah is making the best of his predicament and is taking advantage of coproductions, which are becoming increasingly common in the Middle East and Europe, to collaborate with likeminded directors. He believes that cooperation strengthens a film rather than hampers it. And yet, El Medina, which was written by Nasrallah, Denis, and Nasser Abdel-Rah-- mane, a young Egyptian screenwriter, is an obvious case of a famous Arab proverb: "Too many cooks can spoil the dish." The film's narrative and look are jarringly truncated; the middle section, which unfolds in the suburbs of Paris, seems to belong in an entirely different movie.

Ever since the early Eighties, the civil war has been the leading protagonist in Lebanese cinema. While most Lebanese filmmakers have treated the subject with an alienating heavyhandedness, former Quentin Tarantino cameraman and Lebanon native Ziad Doueiri decided to focus his debut feature, West Beirut, on the funny and innocent misbehavior of two teenagers who relished, at least in the beginning, the unadulterated freedom the war brought them. Doueiri, who moved to L.A. in the early Eighties, says, "I wanted it to be light but to also tackle subjects that are taboo in the Arab world, like sex and religion. And I wanted to provoke a discussion about these issues."

Many Arabs were not eager to discuss these sensitive matters. West Beirut was banned in a number of Arab countries but when Doueiri initially tried to shop his script around in the Middle East, he came out empty-handed. So he turned to Europe and landed a contract with La Sept-Arte, a French production company.

French money is now single-handedly reviving, or creating, the cinema of the Arabic-speaking North African nations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, which leads one to question the authenticity of these works. After all, in the early part of the twentieth century, when the French colonized a number of Arab countries, they attempted to mold these nations into mini-- Frances, imposing their language and their schooling system on the Arabs. But Doueiri says that the French did not ask him to make any concessions for West Beirut; they only required that he hire French technicians to work on the set. "They gave me the money because they believed in the project," says Doueiri. "Without the French, my film would have never been made."

And what a shame that would have been. West Beirut was a huge hit in Lebanon and it garnered several prizes at a number of international festivals before it opened last summer in the U.S. Following its overwhelming audience response at the 1998 Beirut International Film Festival, West Beirut was picked up by one of the biggest film theaters in the city and for several months its boxoffice receipts surpassed the top American films. Its long run gave hope to young Middle Eastern filmmakers who feared that the Arab audience was interested only in American blockbusters.

Doueiri refuses to be labeled as an Arab director since he chooses to remain in L.A., where he has just completed a new script about an American official's plight to implement peace in the Middle East. Even so, he stands at the helm of a promising and groundbreaking new generation of Lebanese filmmakers. While Lebanon's yearly film production output remains at only one or two full-length features, filmmakers such as the experimental Akram Zaatari (Crazy For You! and All Is Well On the Border) and the award-winning Elie Khalife (Merci Natex) have been excelling in documentary and short film formats. Lebanon has now also established an impressive number of film schools and programs. Some Arab countries have none.

Unfortunately, two steps forward have been followed by two steps back. The International Beirut Film Festival, which had its third run in October 1999 and was proving to be an important cinematic event with internationally acclaimed films and guests, was canceled this year due to financial difficulties and chaotic organization. Hopefully, it will return in 2001 as planned. Up until recently, Lebanon has been considered a haven for Arab artists looking for creative freedom. They came, as Nasrallah did, even during the raging civil war. But lately, as the government has looked to reassert its position among the neighboring nations, the powers that be have begun flexing their muscles on the media and the arts. Their wrath came down harshly on A Civilized People, the latest film by Randa Chahal Sabbag, one of many women Lebanese directors. (Worth noting in this regard is that women directors are an anomaly in most other Arab countries.) The film, which was awarded the major prize at this year's International Human Rights Film Festival in New York, was banned in Lebanon and in the rest of the Arab world.

Through interwoven vignettes, A Civilized People introduces us to an amalgam of troubled souls trying to survive the daily madness of the war, including an Egyptian lesbian couple and a sniper who doubles as a demented dentist. The censors deemed the depiction of the characters, especially that of the religious sniper, to be vulgar, obscene, antireligious and immoral. They wanted Sabbag to cut twentyone scenes. She refused. "By contesting the censorship, I provoked a discussion in the newspaper which put the government in an embarrassing position," says the Paris-based Sabbag, who was labeled pornographer, slut, and Zionist agent by an indignant Arab press.

Sabbag and Doueiri encountered censorship after their films were completed because their works were financed by European companies. Usually, Arab film projects have to be preapproved by a local censorship committee before shooting commences. The areas of contention for these morality czars are religion (criticism of Islam is usually not allowed), sex (in most countries, the exposure of the human body, including sexual intercourse or birth, is extremely frowned upon) and politics (Syria strictly prohibits any overt criticism of its officials or policies).

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If that wasn't enough to contend with, filmmakers also have to take into account diplomatic relations between the Middle Eastern countries when they try to distribute their work. Doueiri's West Beirut was bought in Israel immediately after it appeared in Cannes in 1998, but the director was forced to pull it out. "The Lebanese government said that if it is shown in Israel then they will not allow it to enter Lebanon," says Doueiri. Sabbag underwent a similar experience. A Civilized People received the UNESCO prize at last year's Venice festival but she had to turn down the award because the committee was asking her to share it with an Israeli director.

For Palestinian filmmakers, politics and cinema have always coexisted. Palestinian cinema came to being in 1967 after the defeat of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan by Israel. Since the beginning, exiled Palestinians formed film units that were annexed to politically-active organizations such as al-Fatah and the PLO. They documented military actions and life in the refugee camps. Today, many documentaries still center around the Palestinian cause. The Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982 brought an end to the cinematic activities of these groups who had relocated to the city. A large part of the Palestinian cinema archive was lost.

These days, directors such as Michel Khleifi (Wedding in Galilee), Ali Nassar (The Milky Way), Rashid Masharawi (Haifa), and the unabashed Elia Suleiman are bringing the cinematic productions of Palestine into the international limelight. Almost all of their films have dealt with the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Suleiman's Chronicle, which was screened at MOMA in 1997 and later opened at New York's Film Forum, is a `Waiting for Godot' celluloid experimentation where people sit and wait, then sit and wait some more, for something that never seems to arrive. A few humorous incidents are the only icebreakers to the extended shots of inert characters. Chronicle's narrative is divided in two parts: "Nazareth Personal Diaries" trails a cast of characters, including Suleiman and his real-life parents, as they tend to their monotonous chores; in "Jerusalem Political Diaries" Suleiman plays himself, a filmmaker hunting for inspiration who finds salvation in a politically-active Arab female performance artist. Needless to say, the film spawned as many detractors as it did admirers-on both sides of the fence. The Palestinians objected to being portrayed as passive victims; the Jewish Israelis were offended by the caricaturistic representation of their officials.

But Suleiman readily admits that he had other, more pressing concerns when he embarked on his project. "In the Seventies all images of the Arab world in the Western media became negative," he says. "I was tired of the representation of Arabs as either primitive people or rich sheiks."

Many Arabs working today in the film medium believe that one of the most threatening obstacles standing in the way of a vibrant Arab cinema is the skewed perception of its people abroad. Doueiri, who shares Suleiman's exasperation, says that he wanted "to show Americans that the Middle East is a normal, fun place, not a camel jockey hideout or Vietnam." First-generation Arabs living in the West are working hard at shattering these stereotypes and at rejuvenating an interest in the films of the Arab world. Small American-Arab organizations such as Alwan in New York, yearly film festivals in San Francisco and Seattle, and Arab Film Distribution, an online venture that sells videotapes of Arab films, have been exposing Western-and Eastern-audiences to the cinematic productions of the region. In Europe, the Biennial of Arab Cinemas held in Paris, and Arabscreen, a documentary and shorts festival in London, have also been major promoters of Arab cinema.

But the problem remains as much internal as it is external. It helps very little that most of today's younger Arab generation share Malkovich's, Suleiman's, and even Doueiri's contempt for Arab films. For the West, the works of Youssef Chahine are a rare exception but for young Arabs who grew up watching sleek Hollywood blockbusters, even they are, as the Francophile Lebanese would stylishly put it, `demode.'

At least Suleiman and Doueiri understood that the Middle Eastern audience was just as fed up as they were with the tired narratives of Arab films and set out to do something about it. The two young directors have a lot in common. They both moved to the U.S. in their twenties. They both returned to their native countries to produce their first feature films (Suleiman eventually decided to stay in Jerusalem, where he just finished shooting a new short entitled Cyber Palestine, a modern-day version of the biblical story of Joseph and Mary). Most importantly, they have both managed to skillfully blend humor and drama with compelling cinematography, without straining too far from the 'Arabness' of the content-the gossiping neighbors, the family relations, the religious issues.

The success that these two directors have encountered in the West as well as in their homelands should set an example for up-andcoming Arab directors who want to make accessible yet challenging films. If enough Arab filmmakers follow their lead and if enough Arabs learn to appreciate and nurture their domestic talent, Arab cinema could very well find itself a worthy companion to the acclaimed film industry of neighboring Iran.

Distribution sources: West Beirut (available Spring 2001) and Wedding in Galilee are distributed bv New Yorker Video, 16 West 61st St., New York, NY 10023, phone (212) 247-6110; Chronicle of a Disappearance is distributed by Winstar Home Video, 419 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016, phone (800) 414-1690; The Milky Way is distributed by Kino International, 333 West 39th St., New York, NY 10018, phone (212) 629-6880; videos of some current and older Arab films are available for purchase through Arab Film Distribution, 10th Ave E, Seattle, Washington 98102, phone (206) 322-0882, www.arabfilm.com.

Events information: Alwan screens Arab films every Saturday at 5:30pm at Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8th St., New York, NY, phone (212) 80-9420; the Arab Film Festival in San Francisco is organized by Cinemayaat, 416 Park Ave, San Jose, CA 95110, phone (415) 564-1100, www.aff.org; the Seattle Arab Film Festival is organized by Arab Film Distribution (address above); for information on the Arab Screen Independent Film Festival contact Arab Screen at Media House, 4 Stratford Place, London W1 N9AE, England, phone 011-44-171491-4855, www.arabscreen.com; the Biennial of Arab Cinemas is organized by L'Institut du Monde Arabe, 1 rue des Fosses-Saint-Bernard, 7005 Paris, phone 011-331-40-51-38-38, www.imarabe.org.

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