Over the past month I saw two movies I’d like to comment about – an Egyptian and a French-speaking Belgian. Shehrezade is an Egyptian movie played by Mona Zaki and was all over the news in Egypt as one of her more important films. It was also deemed ‘controversial’ because it spoke of the hijab. I went to see it with anticipation but also without much expectation because usually such films do not deliver. True to form, this one did not either.

The film purports to speak of women’s issues in a closed society that does not recognize their individuality.  This is portrayed through three separate stories, all connected by one thread which is a television show with its newly married presenter, Mona Zaki. Zaki herself, throughout the movie, is showing us the progression – or regression – of  her own second marriage.  Hence  the name of the movie: she is Shehrezade telling us separate stories as the audience realizes that she herself is under threat as well and her story is yet another story of the oppression of women.  The film ends with Zaki’s husband beating her up and she goes on the airwaves badly bruised to narrate her own story, a scene reminiscent of the Saudi presenter Rania Al Baz whose husband beat her unconscious in 2005 after which she fled to France.

The ‘controversial issue’ of the hijab was only one sentence that one of the characters said, that she felt like she had a ’split personality’ because she wore the hijab on the street but while working at a beauty shop in the mall, she abides by its rules and does not wear the hijab. After that this character disappears and a new story begins.

Overall, it is a great idea for a movie but the stories were so separate that by the time you finished one, you literally forgot it and moved on to the next.  While that is the whole point of the story – or stories – nevertheless the  thread that holds them together is not strong enough.  The story therefore falls apart like little fragmented pieces. The time dedicated to each story was uneven, so the first story was extremely short and seemed totally prematurely cut off, whereas the last story of the three spinster sisters who murdered the man they all wanted to marry seemed excessively long and overpowered the movie. Certainly the strongest story was the presenter’s story herself, but that was not enough to salvage the movie.

Is it worth seeing? I would say yes. Just try to ignore its disastrous shortcomings.

The second movie I saw was Lorna’s Silence – a film directed and screen-written by Belgian directors Jean and Luc Dardenne and acted by Arta Dobroshi, a Kosovian actress in real life. The film revolves around Lorna, an Albanian woman, who becomes involved in the underworld of marriage-for-citizenship schemes. It certainly is also about how poor women become commodities in the hands of ruthless men who want to only make money through them, completely uninterested in how they feel or not feel.

Lorna’s boyfriend is in on the scheme too. They both plan to buy a restaurant with the money she will make through a marriage with a Russian ‘buyer’, arranged by Fabio, a mobster taxi-driver. As an Albanian, she herself had to marry someone to get the Belgian citizenship. Indeed Fabio marries her off to a ‘junkie’ called Claudy who agrees only because he wanted to use the money he will get from Fabio to maintain his drug habit.  All Lorna had to do was tolerate her marriage until she got the citizenship. As Claudy fell deeper and deeper into his drugs, Lorna tried desperately to detach herself from him. However when she learns of Fabio’s intent on killing him with a ‘drug overdose’, she tries and helps him overcome his habit and sends him to rehab.  She tries to convince Fabio that they could just divorce and there was no need to kill Claudy but Fabio was not interested. As time went by, Lorna became more deeply and emotionally entangled with Claudy and one evening they sleep with each other. The following day, Claudy is dead. He was killed by Fabio in order to hasten things with the Russian buyer who did not want to wait for a divorce.  Lorna was silent.

One of the most memorable scenes was when Lorna, Fabio the Russian and his translator went to a restaurant to set a timeline for their marriage and to discuss ‘business’. they were talking about her as though she was not there, and throughout she remained silent. Fabio asked them to dance in order to have witnesses  that will testify that they ‘knew each other’ when they investigated his citizenship request. While dancing, Lorna picks up her courage and asks him if he was ok if she was pregnant! Since the Russian could not understand English, he thought she wanted to get pregnant with him and called on his translator to tell her no he did not want that. As she tried desperately to silence him Fabio intervenes and reassures the Russian that everything would be ok. Once out of the restaurant Fabio beats Lorna up and tells her that she will have to go through an abortion.

The silent Lorna was told at the hospital that she was not pregnant at all, but she was not convinced. Her boyfriend left her and the Russian refused to marry her and she knew that Fabio would kill her. The film ends with her in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, talking to her ‘baby’ and telling him that they will not kill him like they killed his father because she would protect him.

And so Lorna remained silent  till the end and yet not inactive. A tragic heroine – a modern version of Tess of the D’Urbeville. The film was powerful, all-engaging, and very intense. It is one of those films that make you sit in your chair after the movie is over just trying to wrap your head around the question  ‘what the heck just happened?’ Dobroshi’s award-winning acting revealed the depth of emotions that she went through during the different stages in the film even without saying much. Her expressive depth of emotions together with her attempts at indifference portrayed the conflict she was feeling inside: poverty had taken its toll and she was struggling between a desire to live a better life sometime in the future by acting indifferent to other people at present [use and be used], and on the other hand her deep moral desire to do what is right and moral although it would still lead to more poverty.

No wonder  the film won best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival among other awards. It is a very profound movie – and Lorna’s silence said so much more than what Shehrezade narrated. Silence is sometimes gold.

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I just saw the documentary Garbage Dreams on the Egyptian al Zabbaleen area by Mai Iskandar in the Rhode Island International Film Festival. It is indeed a great documentary – very moving and concise.

The documentary follows the story of three teenage boys who grew up on the outskirts of Egypt in one of the poorest informal settlements in Egypt, and whose lives revolve around collecting and recycling garbage from metro Cairo. It follows their dreams over a two year period [although the documentary was filmed over a 4 year period] as they live their ups and downs, and conveys their aspirations and humble dreams. The most they dreamed of was getting married – and even though two of the boys are taken on a trip to Wales to see how garbage was recycled there, one of them still dreamed of staying in Cairo and emulating Wales’s methods, while the other dreamed of leaving ‘either to Europe or America.’ Their situation worsens when Egypt decides to contract foreign companies to collect garbage in a ‘more civilized way’, leaving this community completely defenseless and increasing their poverty.

The Zabbaleen community happens to be a Coptic Christian community, and is up in the hills in Mokattem, just behind another larger, mostly Muslim, informal settlement called Manshiet Nasser. While many Copts have hailed the documentary as a documentary about the ‘Copts’, it really is a documentary that touches far more than this one issue. It is a documentary about the forgotten poor, the environment, illiteracy, closed doors, and the politics of corruption. It is also a ’social statement’ where even the ‘educated community’ at large is refusing and is skeptical about the concept of recycling.

As Mai Iskandar acknowledged in an interview, the Zabbaleen only happened to be Christians because when they migrated from rural areas they came with their chicken and pigs.. the pigs being raised only by Christians since it is considered ‘haram’ in Islam. Their natural choice of profession was garbage collection precisely because of the pigs who ate this garbage.

If you look at the documentary with a ‘non-religious’ eye, you will note many eye-opening moments – such as when the boys are flabergasted that the new foreign companies recycle only 40% of garbage and bury the rest, whereas they themselves recycled 80%. The community was completely ignored in the decision making process to move to more ‘civilized’ methods, and instead of empowering that community and helping them advance, the government chose to completely overlook and ignore them, leaving them to their destiny.

The documentary ends before the ’swine flu’ crisis and the disastrous decision made by the Egyptian government to slaughter all pigs, thus further alienating and impoverishing this community. However from my own experience at the Zabbaleen area, I can say that there are non-profit organizations helping them. In fact, Yusreya Sawiris, mother of the famed billionaire Nagib Sawiris, and businesswoman Laila Iskandar,  are both there in full force and they are credited with the entire recycling project and factory.  I should mention that my father, a brilliant engineer, was actually recruited by Yusreya to oversee the factory’s equipment and machines, a project that he undertook until the day he died in 2005 at the age of 90, after which the factory closed down because the machines stopped functioning. Too bad their efforts were not mentioned in the documentary, but then I also know that Yusreya hates publicity, and the movie’s focus is not that at all.  I also need to mention my own involvement in Manshiet Nasser where I used to work with the poorest of the poor, and still have connections there and I help out whenever I can. In fact, they used to tell me that the people of the Zabballeen were ‘the poor people’ and I used to smile. Poverty is relative, I guess.

In any case, because of my experience in Manshiet Nasser, a mostly Muslim community, I know that this documentary, if filmed about Manshiet Nasser, will be just as heart-wrenching.

Poverty knows no religion. Neither does corruption.

Kudos to Mai Iskandar and her fantastic documentary.

Trailer

فى جرنال على الإنترنت عادة ما يقوم بتجريح المسيحيين بشكل عام مع أنه المفترض أنه ليس دينيا قال أحدهم هذه الجملة كعنوان لتعليقه على مقال فى الجريدة المسماة بالوطن – وهذه نكتة أخرى – أى وطن؟؟؟ وبعد عنوان التعليق استفاض يشرح: “من اشد المسيحيين عداء لامة الاسلام استغرب والله كيف يسكت اهلنا بمصر الغالية لمثل تلك الحثالة التي تعيث في الارض فسادا عن جل الاساءت التي يقدمون عليها من قتل للمتحولين والمتحولات الى دين الاسلام … مرورا بالمنابر والاقلام التي تشكك الناس في عقيدة الاسلام
جدار الصمت” والأخ من اليمن السعيد – أو الغير سعيد حسبما تختار أن تسميه.

بالرغم من أننى عادة لا أكتب الردود على مثل هذا الشذوذ إلا أننى أجبته بالفعل وقلت أنه يقول هذا لأنه على غير دراية بالتاريخ ولأن مصر بها سماحة لا يعرفها الأخ فى بلده. والطريف أن الجريدة إختارت ألا تنشر التعليق بل نشرت فقط باقى السادة والسيدات اللذين يشتمون بالنصارى والأقباط والمسيحيين.

وهذه هى مشكلة العرب: لا يعرفون من العدو ومن الحبيب وكل من ليس منهم فهو عليهم.

شىء حقيقى محزن ومؤلم!! آلمنى بشدة ما أفعله من أجل الأمة العربية والأخ جالس فى بيته لا يفعل شيئا سوى الشتيمة يمينا وشمالا. آلمنى جدا ما يفعولنه القساوسة والمطارنة فى فلسطين دفاعا عن فلسطين بينما هذا الأخ عايش فى اليمن السعيد, سعيد بالهبالة التى كتبها ونشرت له  فى تعليقات الجريدة.

الطريف أن الموضوع أصلا كان موضوع عن جرائم الإنترنت, ومن بين الجرائم تغيير الديانة أو “اصطياد النساء والرجال” للمسيحية. يا سلام على الجريمة!! الناس فى العالم كله ماشية فى طريق ودول ماشيين فى طريق معاكس تماما!!  يقول كاتب المقال أن الباحث الذى كتب الموضوع يرى ضرورة زيادة المواقع الإسلامية ومواقع الدعوة.. هو مش برضه الإنترنت إخترعه مسيحيين؟ بيستعمله ليه الأخ من اليمن السعيد وغيره ممن يكتبون فى هذه الجريدة؟ هى يا ناس حرب دينية؟ هل يعرف هذا الأخ من هو عدوه؟؟؟

خنجر يطعن الأمة؟ يا نهار أسود!! وكمان يشجع ويحرض المصريين على العنف: “كيف يقبل المصريين هذا؟” عايزهم يعملوا إيه بالضبط؟ يقوموا يذبحوهم؟ مش فاهمة الحقيقة.

على فكرة فى العادة أقول لمن لا يحب شىء على الإنترنت أن لا يقرأه وخلاص… وأنا لا أحب هذه الجريدة ولكن المشكلة أنها تأتينى خمس مرات على البريد الإلكترونى مع أنى لم أشارك فى هذه الجريدة أو غيرها, ومع أنى وضعت فلتر بمسح هذه الجريدة كلما أتتنى إلا أنها لا تزال تأتينى

لو حد عنده بديل يقول لى

This video is extremely disturbing. I suggest you DO NOT  turn the sound on even if you watch it. So why am I posting about it? because it is very disturbing and MUST be spoken about; because this is what happens when ‘holier than thou’ radicals take over. For the longest time the Talibans in Afghanistan were one of the most radical and fundamental regimes in the world, murdering, slaughtering and beheading people left and right, attacking women and men alike, attacking technology, television.. anything that constitutes any kind of progress from their own barbaric ways. The attacks on women are usually justified by their covering/uncovering of clothing, accusations of adultery or simply attacking schools for little girls.

Now Taliban murderers have taken over a city in Pakistan, and believe that it is their divine right to apply ‘God’s sharia’ by flogging a 17 year old in public. She was accused of adultery!!! Her BROTHER was one of the men holding her  down!!!

Inhuman, insane, barbaric to say the very least. This is not shari’a and many regular Muslims can explain why that is not so.  To simplify the matter, let me just say that to apply shari’a law in cases of adultery there has to be specific guidelines that cannot be met in this day and age. I will not elaborate because that is not my field nor my concern right now. My concern is that little girl [and other men/women like her] who live in constant fear of the murderous, uneducated and barbaric Talibans. My concern is how those people are threatening Pakistan and the Pakistani judicial system – not to mention civil society.

I should add that the only other countries that apply such behavior and call it sharia are Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan as more and more radicals take over.

Read the BBC article here .

Click here to view the video from LiveLeak: VIDEO or from the BBC Video here.

بيسموا ده شريعة إسلامية ومش عارفة فيه إيه من الشريعة. أنا عارفة إن ممكن ناس كتثر ترد عليهم وتوضح إن ده لا شريعة ولا شىء. ولكن الظالبان القتلة المجرمين دى ناس بلا ضمير وبلا أخلاق وبلا دين

أنظر الفيديو فى الوصلات السابقة

Listen to the refuseniks, the activists and the great people of honour who are opposed to occupation. An amazing video!

لو يذكر الزيتون غارسهُ
لصار الزيت دمعا!
يا حكمة الأجدادِ
لو من لحمنا نعطيك درعا!
لكن سهل الريح،
لا يعطي عبيد الريح زرعا!
إنا سنقلع بالرموشِ
الشوك والأحزان.. قلعا!
وإلام نحمل عارنا وصليبنا!
والكون يسعى..
سنظل في الزيتون خضرته،
وحول الأرض درعا!!

محمود درويش

نموتُ مجَّاناً .. كما الذُّبابُ في إفْريقيا
نموتُ كالذُبَابْ.
ويدخلُ الموتُ علينا ضاحكاً
ويُقفِلُ الأبوابْ.
نموتُ بالجُمْلة في فراشنا
ويرفضُ المسؤولُ عن ثلاجة الموتى
نموتُ .. في حرب الإشاعاتِ..
وفي حرب الإذاعاتِ..
وفي حرب التشابيهِ..
وفي حرب الكِنَاياتِ..
وفي خديعة السَّرابْ .
نموتُ.. مَقْهورينَ، مَنْبُوذينَ ، ملْعُونينَ..
مَنْسيِّينَ كالكلابْ ..
يُفَلْسِفُ الخَرَابْ…
…
يا وطني الغارقَ في دمائهِ
يا أيها المَطْعُونُ في إبائهِ
مدينةً مدينةً..
نافذةً نافذةً ..
غمامةً غمامةً..
حمامةً حمامةً ..
مئذنةً مئذنةً ..
أخافُ أن أُقرِئَكَ السلامْ ..يُسافر الخنجرُ في عروبتي
يسافر الخِنجرُ في رُجولتي
هل هذه هزيمةٌ قُطْريَّةٌ ؟
أم هذه هزيمةٌ قوميّةٌ ؟
أم هذه هزيمتي ؟؟

مذيع قناة الجزيرة  جمال ريان لم يستطع منع نفسه من البكاء وهو يستمع لتقرير حول مقتل أربعة أطفال أخوة من أسرة واحدة. وبكيت معه

Al Jazeera reporter Jamal Rayan could not take the images and report on the murder of 4 little brothers in Gaza. He cried. So did I. Watch the video:

مترجمة للعربية

All those children dead.. blown away, burried under the rubble, shot and killed or wounded.

All that murder.. and Congress passes a resolution in support of Israel.. a unanimous  resolution with the exception of Kucinich – brave, courageous Kucinich who said ‘Wake up America’.

Wake up America indeed! you are supporting genocide and ethnic cleansing. And you just don’t get it. You just don’t get it because ‘they have eyes but cannot see, mouths but cannot speak.’

I am appalled!!

Uri Avnery wrote an excellent article today called Molten Lead in Gaza. The key points:

1- it was not Hamas that broke the truce as is commonly reported in US media following the spin of the Israelis.

As a matter of fact, the cease-fire did not collapse, because there was no real cease-fire to start with. The main requirement for any cease-fire in the Gaza Strip must be the opening of the border crossings. There can be no life in Gaza without a steady flow of supplies. But the crossings were not opened, except for a few hours now and again. The blockade on land, on sea and in the air against a million and a half human beings is an act of war, as much as any dropping of bombs or launching of rockets.

Then there came the small provocations which were designed to get Hamas to react. After several months, in which hardly any Qassam rockets were launched, an army unit was sent into the Strip “in order to destroy a tunnel that came close to the border fence”. From a purely military point of view, it would have made more sense to lay an ambush on our side of the fence. But the aim was to find a pretext for the termination of the cease-fire, in a way that made it plausible to put the blame on the Palestinians. And indeed, after several such small actions, in which Hamas fighters were killed, Hamas retaliated with a massive launch of rockets, and – lo and behold – the cease-fire was at an end. Everybody blamed Hamas.

2- the timing of the attack is perfect

The timing was chosen meticulously from another angle too. The attack started two days after Christmas, when American and European leaders are on holiday until after New Year. The calculation: even if somebody wanted to try and stop the war, no one would give up his holiday. That ensured several days free from outside pressures.

Another reason for the timing: these are George Bush’s last days in the White House. This blood-soaked moron could be expected to support the war enthusiastically, as indeed he did. Barack Obama has not yet entered office and had a ready made pretext for keeping silent: “there is only one President”. The silence does not bode well for the term of president Obama.

3- how this exposes Arab leaders:

another thing that is being imprinted on the minds of these millions: the picture of the miserable, corrupt, passive Arab regimes.

As seen by Arabs, one fact stands out above all others: the wall of shame.

4- how this will yet again remove and marginalize the moderates in the Arab World and simply give rise to fundamentalistic ideology:

This will have historic consequences. A whole generation of Arab leaders, a generation imbued with the ideology of secular Arab nationalism, the successors of Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, Hafez al-Assad and Yasser Arafat, may be swept from the stage. In the Arab space, the only viable alternative is the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism.

This war is a writing on the wall: Israel is missing the historic chance of making peace with secular Arab nationalism. Tomorrow, It may be faced with a uniformly fundamentalist Arab world, Hamas multiplied by a thousand.

Could anyone have said it better?

“In the war of the pictures we lose, so you need to correct, explain or balance it in other ways,” said Aviv Shir-On, foreign ministry deputy director-general for public affairs. “Support doesn’t mean the world is standing behind us, but it does mean people understand what we are doing and why.”

Need we say more? The following is Orwellian or Huxleyian to the extreme:

The body, known as the National Information Directorate, was set up eight months ago following recommendations from an Israeli inquiry into the 2006 Lebanon war. Its role is to deal with hasbara – meaning, in Hebrew, “explanation”, and referring variously to information, spin, and propaganda. [link]