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ARABIAN NIGHTS: RETROSPECTIVE ON THE EGYPTIAN WRITER YOUSRY NASRALLAH

A lavish cinema.

Filled with images, characters, desires, crossings, individuals: Yousry Nasrallah’s cinema may be defined as such. Born in Cairo in 1952, he attended a German school and then graduated in Economics and Political Science at the University of Cairo. After entering the Cairo Film Institute, he moved to Lebanon in 1978 (right in the middle of the civil war), where he became a journalist and wrote for the newspaper “Al-Safir”. He then came back to Egypt, determined to be a filmmaker. He worked as Director’s assistant for Volker Schlöndorff in Die Fälschung and was production assistant for Youssef Chahine, one of the greatest Egyptian directors. In 1988 he shot his first feature film, Sarikat Sayfeya (Vols d’été), which will later win the Prix de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festivals.

In 1993 he shot Marcides (Mercedes), and that’s where our journey starts from. It is a crowded movie: Nubi, the protagonist, is an upper-class Christian communist, his mother is in love with a black man, his brother is gay, his aunt deals with drugs and organs, his girlfriend is a belly dancer who looks just like his mother (Yousra, an Egyptian movie star, plays both characters), and a cop is trying to convince him to engage in an Islamic group. It is1990, the World Cup is taking place, the Berlin Wall has fallen and in Egypt the first waves of fundamentalism are appearing on the scene.

Two years after, he shot a documentary, Sobyan wa banat (A propos des garçons, des filles et du voile), in which he moves from the upper-class milieu of Marcides to the working class neighbourhood where Bassem Samra, his family and his friend live (Samra was part of the Marcides cast, and will later be the leading character of El Medina). Nasrallah follows them and listens to what they think of themselves, of gender relations, of maleness and femaleness, of love and sex and of the veil which seems to be once again largely in use within the Egyptian society.
Ali, the main character of El Medina (The city, 1999, Special Jury Award at the Locarno Festival), leaves Cairo dreaming of success and emancipation, and ends up coming back home. Yet he is not coming back to the simplicity of his origins, but with a new awareness - and indeed, in El Cairo Ali will eventually become an actor, as he had dreamed of ever since he had hanged on the walls of his old bedroom the poster of Robert Niro in Raging Bull.
Nasrallah’s last film is not an ‘egyptian’ movie anymore. Taken from a novel by Elias Khoury, La Porte du Soleil, Bab el-Chams tells the history of the Palestinian people from the 1948 nakba to 1995. It does this through two love stories: the one between Younès and Nahila, and that between Khalil and Chams.
From Palestine to the refugee camps of Lebanon: war, death and exile are alternated with - or, better, are living with - passion, happiness, life. While telling a story that has never been told before, at least not by cinema and rarely by literature (the Palestinian history is still mainly existing in the form of oral memories, personal photographs and amateur videos), Nasrallah does not give up his vision of cinema - and Khoury’s beautiful novel surely helps him in this sense. He does not give up his refusal of turning the characters into symbols; and indeed, his characters are always too complex, special and full of contradictions to become icons, as they’re just as complex and full of things as reality is. And so, in the middle of tragedy comes silliness, desperation alternates with love, and sexuality is always there, being ‘naturally’ part of our lives.
An image. Ali in El Medina does a good audition and gets the role of Frankestein: Frankestein the monster, the one who goes beyond all the rules, who can’t be embedded into an architecture of definitions and genders, who can cross all borders and never be imprisoned. Just as Nasrallah’s work.

Davide Oberto