Black Night Eclipse, his contribution to the Tunisia-produced omnibus film The Gulf War . . . What Next? (1991), continues this exploration. Khalass (2007) shows seeds of hope in the friendship of three civil war survivors, despite renewed violence in Lebanon. His subsequent short film, Mazen and the Ant (2008), was produced by the Al Jazeera Children’s Channel. It recounts the story of a boy who decides to help an ant struggling to carry a grain of wheat, thus risking lateness to school. Alaouié teaches at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut.
AL-ARISS, ALI (1909–1965)
The first Lebanese filmmaker, Al-Ariss directed two narrative features in the mid-1940s. The Rose Seller (1943) had limited success, but due to a controversy over artistic control, Kawkab, Princess of the Desert (1946) attracted large audiences upon its release. These are considered the first “talkies” in Lebanon, with the Egyptian vernacular spoken in Rose and a Bedouin vernacular in Kawkab. As with many Lebanese Muslims, Al-Ariss’s pan-Arabist politics favored building on the Egyptian model rather than creating a “Lebanese” cinema.
AL-DARADJI, MOHAMED (1978–)
Baghdad-born Al-Daradji fled Iraq for the Netherlands in 1995, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, then trained in directing and cinematography in the United Kingdom before returning to Iraq in 2003, in the midst of the Iraq War, to begin his professional filmmaking career. In 2006, he directed his first narrative feature, Ahlaam, a hyper-kinetic dramatization of the U.S. bombing of Baghdad, focusing on its effects within a mental institution and its titular, female patient, the highly aestheticized, dreamlike rendering of whose perceptions serves to universalize the devastation, thus enabling an allegorical reading of an essentially “insane,” irrational Iraqi mindset. Ahlaam received much international attention, including an Academy Award nomination as Iraq’s official entry. Al-Daradji’s next film, Son of Babylon (2009), also well-received internationally, narrates the journey of a young boy, Ahmed, and his sickly grandmother, Umm Ibrahim, as they travel across Iraq in search of his father, Ibrahim, apparently lost in war. As with Ahlaam, the causes and conditions of Iraqi wartime suffering are taken out of context, with stereotypical portrayals of Arabs and Muslims substituting for serious explanation. In 2013, Al-Daradji continued—while complicating—the journey motif with In the Sands of Babylon, a hybrid feature now centering on an Iraqi soldier (the missing father in Son of Babylon) who escapes imprisonment in Kuwait during the Gulf War, only to end up in one of Saddam Hussein’s prisons. Twenty years later, Ibrahim’s fate is revisited by those who knew him, in investigative interviews conducted by Al-Daradji and interwoven throughout the fictional narrative, itself supplemented by the insertion of contemporary newsreel footage. Al-Daradji has been criticized for reportedly having collaborated with U.S. forces during the shooting of Ahlaam, and with the Iraqi police and military during the shooting of Son of Babylon. His most recent feature, Journey (2017), concerns an Iraqi female suicide bomber who decides to abort her planned action.
AL-DEGHIDI, INAS (1954–)
A rare female director in the Egyptian film industry, al-Deghidi was born in Cairo and graduated from the Cairo Film Institute in 1975. She then worked as an assistant to both Salah Abu Seif and Henri Barakat before directing her own features, beginning with Excuse Me, It’s the Law (1985). Women are prominent in many of her films, and she has been credited with reenvisioning their relationships to one another and to the dominant male gaze of mainstream commercial films, in works such as Cheap Flesh (1995), Night Talk (1999), Memoirs of an Adolescent (2002), and Researchers for Freedom (2004).
ALEXANDRIA (AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL) TRILOGY/QUARTET
Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria, Why? (1978), An Egyptian Story (1982), and Alexandria, Again and Forever (1990), to which his Alexandria . . . New York (2004) is sometimes added, make up an unofficial, broadly autobiographical, reflexively cinematic record of this most honored Egyptian director’s career. The first film, set in Alexandria during World War II, intercuts autobiographical material—scenes of Chahine’s prototype, Yehia (Mohsen Mohieddin), at Victoria College, attending movies, staging satirical reviews, reciting Hamlet, and eventually boarding a boat to the United States to train as an actor at the Pasadena Playhouse—with documentary footage of the war and with several other plotlines. These include the story of an Egyptian aristocrat with a habit of kidnapping and murdering Allied soldiers, who falls in love with his latest victim (a young, working-class man from Dover eventually killed at El Alamein, prompting a pacifist musical montage among the gravestones); and a pregnant Jewish woman and her family who, fleeing Egypt from the advancing Germans, end up disillusioned by Zionism in Palestine. Meanwhile, her child’s father, a Muslim, participates halfheartedly in a crackpot scheme to assassinate Winston Churchill. The film is marked by its tonal breadth, abrupt editing, fantasy sequences, and overlapping narratives.
An Egyptian Story is set in London, where the protagonist, Yehia, now played by New Realist film star Nur El-Sherif, has traveled from Egypt for heart surgery following a stroke suffered on the set of The Sparrow (1973), of which he is the tempermental, self-absorbed director who ignores his wife (Yousra). However, by a device reminiscent of A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell, 1946), the operation is intercut with a fantastical courtroom trial scene set inside the protagonist’s rib cage, where a 10-year-old Yehia is invoked, who periodically drops crystals into a large tube to illustrate how various life events—in addition to heavy smoking—have led to the clogging of his arteries. The film provides multiple flashbacks from the imaginary courtroom (also peopled with Yehia’s relatives) that convey the director’s relationships with women and men and his career as a filmmaker. Clips from several of Chahine’s earlier films, including Cairo Station (1958), are inserted, as is documentary footage from notable events in Egyptian history—underscoring the film’s allegorical layering. Yehia’s yearning for recognition in the West is in turn foregrounded, as is his ambivalent relationship with American cinema and the United States. In one flashback, he is portrayed taking his Jamila, the Algerian (1958) to a Soviet film festival, wondering whether a filmmaker can be a revolutionary, where he meets Henri Langlois of the French Cinémathèque. To get a film made, in one comic scene, Yehia pretends it will be a sex comedy.
The most explicitly self-reflexive of the series, a film about the making of a film that switches abruptly between and across plots, is Alexandria, Again and Forever. In one respect, the film focuses on the relationship between Yehia, this time played by Chahine himself, and his young protégé—and lover—Amir (Mohieddin). While Yehia wants to produce Shakespearean plays, wishing to see Amir cast as Hamlet, Amir himself is more interested in television and its ostensibly more pedestrian fare. In addition, the film focuses on a 1987 film industry strike in response to government changes in organizing laws. Once again, clips from other Chahine films are incorporated, with several from Cairo Station match-cut to Yehia and Amir as they dance, Singin’ in the Rain–like, in the streets of Berlin, where they have traveled for the film festival. Although humor is still present—in a campy version of Anthony and Cleopatra that costars Yousra (playing herself in the Chahine film), for instance, and by the use of accelerated footage—the film also expresses a deeper cynicism about Egyptian society.
Alexandria . . . New York, by contrast, is set in the United States, cross-cutting between Yehia’s contemporary visit to New York City to attend a retrospective of his work and a historical record of his days at the Pasadena Playhouse during the 1940s. Yehia—again played by Chahine—has fathered a son in a reunion with Ginger, his lover from his Pasadena days. This son, Alexander, is now the lead dancer with the New York City Ballet and represents a self-absorbed United States for which Egypt is
