Egyptian director Raafat Al Mihi's literary debut, published recently in Paris, was banned on entry to Egypt. The event coincided with other censorial troubles, and the director is finding his right to self-expression increasingly under siege, according to Al Ahram Weekly.
Now in his 60s, Mihi is depressed, on the point of quitting filmmaking, and, he says, considering emigration. As the poignant narrative of this filmmaker's relationship with cinema demonstrates, the predicament is symptomatic of an entire generation of artists and incorrigible dreamers.
When he entered the world of cinema in the 1970s, subsequently moving into production and direction, Mihi had endless faith in the possibility of change; now, it seems, he is giving in. "Nobody among us is as ingenious as Suad Hosni," the writer-director declared recently on MBC satellite television. "But we will all meet the same end." How, ran the implied question, can we escape the depression to which she ultimately succumbed?
As a filmmaker Mihi has been controversial, to say the least. Together with other directors of the same generation, he is often characterized as being too artistic; his own preference for fantasia is indicative of a cinema, many argue, accessible only to an elite, intellectual class. His films, furthermore, are often read as subversive, and the subsequent uproars resulted, most dramatically perhaps, in a civil suit filed against Lil Hobb Qissa Akhira (For Love, A Final Story, 1986), a film containing sex scenes that undoubtedly enraged many.
Mihi's films often adopt a similar gambit, tackling controversial subjects by positing them in fantastic settings. In several films he has discussed the absurdities of current moral codes; in Al Sada Al Rigal (The Gentlemen, 1987) the two protagonists each undergo a sex-change; in Sayyidati, Anisati (Ladies and Gentlemen, 1990) the four leading females decide to marry the same man and live together, thereby exposing the absurdity of polygamy, while in Samak, Laban, Tamrhindi (Fish, Milk and Tamrhindi, 1988) the protagonists are brainwashed by their enemies to prevent them from rebelling, a process that eventually leads to their deaths.
And now he has written a novel, Hurghada: Sihr Al Ishq (Hurghada: Love's Magic), which has brought him once more into the spotlight, not least because it has been denied access to Egypt on the grounds that it includes explicit sex scenes and that the plot, involving Muslim-Coptic love affairs, threatens national unity. That Mihi opted to use the English (Hurghada) rather than the Arabic (Ghardaqa) name of the Red Sea town in his title, along with his decision to publish the novel in Paris, served only to fuel speculation over its content, which is likely, many believe, to enhance Mihi's reputation for controversy.
The novel is set in Hurghada and includes several love stories, the main being the ones between Sara and her husband Qadri, who dies, and Khaled, a Muslim police officer, and the Coptic Amna. The first couple are separated by death, the second by religious codes. In despair, Khaled turns to his Muslim friend Zuhra, and the couple conceive a child. But Khaled eventually returns to Amna, whose uncle, an American émigré, encourages the couple to marry in the United States. Consequently, the elderly Amm Fanous, after giving up most of his property to the church, decides to convert from Christianity to Islam to marry Zuhra and so provide for her baby.
Mihi's turn to novel writing naturally prompts questions as to whether he is now moving away from cinema to concentrate on writing, or whether Hurghada: Sihr Al Ishq is an isolated incident.
"There is no justification for the question," argues Mihi. "I feel that every citizen has the right to enter any artistic medium with the object of expressing himself in that medium, be it writing or film. Before I started writing screenplays, in fact, I wrote five or six short stories that were published. Then I discovered cinema, and I realized that it was a virgin language, as beautiful as it is pliable. I felt that the human being in me really could structure his vision in the medium of film. And as I wrote my first screenplays I loved it with a passion. People began to comment that the person behind those screenplays was in effect a filmmaker preparing films he would direct. This was like a message to me: the screenplays I wrote read like the working notes of a practicing director. And I continued to write scripts until I felt I had reached the end of what I had in me to supply in this vein. My last screenplay was Ala Mann Nutliq Al Rasas (Whom Do We Shoot At), which was released in 1975. As a screenplay writer I felt as though I had reached the end of my tether. Then I took five years off, doing nothing apart from thinking and working with the late Suad Hosni and the late Salah Jahine on Al Mutawahisha (The Wild One, 1979), a project in which I was only the executive producer, participating in neither the screenplay nor the direction of the film. During those five years I contemplated what to do next, and in 1980 I began making the films that bear my name as director [Uyun La Tanam (Eyes That Don't Sleep); Al Afokato (The Attorney); Lil Hobb Qissa Akhira, Al Sada Al Rigal, Samak Laban Tamrhindi; Sayyidati Anisati, Alashan Rabina Yihibak, and Shurum Burum among others]. And I was happy with cinema throughout this period, feeling enthralled by it, truly enjoying what I was doing, in the sense that my position behind the camera gave me joy."
"I have declared my intention to stop working in the cinema. I have decided to sell everything -- my negatives, the studio and the rights to my work -- and start anew. I don't know what I will do. At present I am writing another novel, really enjoying writing it; it is called Al Gamila Hatman Tuhibuni (The Beautiful Woman Undoubtedly Loves Me), and am finding an outlet in literature.
"Writing a novel, one isn't as enslaved by the whims of irrelevant people the way one is making a film. Maybe I will just enjoy myself and be selfish, maybe I will leave the country, maybe I will start another career. I don't know what I will do, but I feel I've had enough of this struggle. All I ever wanted was to realize a simple dream, but at my age I no longer feel like being humiliated. Suad Hosni's death was a moment of illumination. I felt I wasn't as much of a genius as she and that her end, or something similar, would happen to me if I continued, doggedly, to waste my remaining years in this field of endeavor. It was the nadir of my depression, maybe because I enjoyed such a close relationship with her. If this woman could receive such bad treatment, I felt, then everything is wrong, everyone is stupid and there is no hope." – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
