Osian's - Cinefan 6

An Overview of Arab Cinema

In the 1990s, Arab cinema experienced a great setback in the field of production and a severe crises on the artistic level. This was especially true of the main film-producing countries: Egypt, Syria , Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. The absence of cinema in the other Arab countries has become more concrete. So far, Jordan and Libya have produced no feature films. Iraq had stopped production since the early 90s. Kuwait still remembers its only two - Enough, You Sea! and Al-Zein’s Wedding directed by Khalid Al-Saddiq. And only recently has Bassam Al-Zawadi been able to produce the second Bahraini film digitally. Dubai and Oman are trying to replace film production by expensive and fabricated film festivals. Movie theatres are on the decline in many countries, particularly outside the capitals and main cities

The state of cinema in the Arab world, therefore, presents a diversified picture, so much so that it is difficult to even use the term ‘Arab Cinema’. What we have are Arab cinemas that were for long - in fact up to the 60s - influenced by the Egyptian cinema, either in their choice of subjects or in their techniques. There were years when one hundred films would be produced annually in Egypt. Studios and theatres were set up, especially in Cairo; an army of actors, technicians and directors worked in the field of cinema production. The industry was able to find markets in many countries. Egyptian cinema had monopolized the Arab market, and was a powerful competitor to foreign films in all Arab countries. Today the term ‘film industry’ can apply only to Egypt (earlier, prior to the Lebanese Civil War, it included Lebanon as well). Its great industry, which had flourished for three decades after World War II, has been experiencing a downward spiral.

This downslide of the 80s and the 90s had its effect in terms of both quantity and quality. In more than one edition, the Cairo International Film Festival suffered a crisis in selecting an Egyptian film for the Festival’s competition section. Some of this darkness was lifted, however, by films made by a few serious filmmakers, such as Atef Al-Tayyeb, Khairy Beshara, Mohammad Khan, Daoud Abdulsayyed, and later by Radwan El-Kashif, Majdi Ahmed Ali, Mohamd Al-Qalyoubi , Sharif Arafah, as well as by a handful of young filmmakers such as Hani Khalifa and Saad Al-Hindawi. These filmmakers and the accomplishments of the Cinema Institute in Cairo are the last hopes of keeping serious cinema alive going after the decline.

Other Arab countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia and Algeria are producing fewer and fewer films, hardly more than one or two a year. Only Morocco has occasionally been able to exceed this number. What has certainly helped are co- productions with France, the Netherlands and Belgium, and in some rare cases, Italy and Germany.

Accusations have been hurled at such cooperation. It seemed as if some of the directors were projecting the Western point of view of our Arab reality. Such productions are still criticised as being more interested in anthropology and marginal matters, and concentrating on certain recurrent subjects such as women, customs, traditions, the magic of the Orient and even homosexuality. Arab-European cooperation was by no means devoid of such influences, and many directors fell victim to this trap. But to limit this wide cooperation to such considerations would be very unjust. In addition to the immense technical assistance, which has raised the level of Arab films in terms of both sound and image, Arab cinema has been vastly enriched in other ways too.