We visited Morocco, Egypt and the Gulf, through popular and critical film, music, urban planning and political debate. Indeed, this final week of Shubbak was the most exciting.
Two cinema events this week presented rare opportunities to see out of the vault and newly released films. The Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project screened the newly completed and twice-awarded film by Lebanese filmmaker, Rania Stephan. The film, “The Three Disappearances of Souad Hosni,” is an elegy to the icon Souad as a screen actress of popular Arab movies for three decades. Awarded by Sharjah Biennial Prize 2011 and the International Documentary Festival of Marseilles, it easily fits into a number of categories from art film to informative, explorative and cinematic. Seventy minutes in duration, every image and every piece of sound is taken from 65 of Housni’s 80 films, spanning the 1960s to the 1990s.
The film, as Stephan explains it, is a fiction made out of a fiction. It is a not a biopic about a woman, but a narrative built by images of a woman within various characters. Rather than mourning the death of a star, it celebrates her life. “We are talking about cinema, reflecting on it, on her as an actress and the body of work she has,” Stephan commented.
The aim is to revive a visual culture that now lies as a past era in popular Arab movies. As a film student, Stephan studied cinemas from all over the world, from kung fu pictures to French realism and so on, but was always disappointed by the lack of mention of Arab films.
“I felt that I discovered my own culture through these films, at the same time breaking a presupposed idea of class and the arts. It was popular entertainment, but Souad transgressed this. That made me happy, so now I feel I have to repay her for this,” says Stephan.
Besides, this is also the hope that this glimpse of Egypt’s cinema will also challenge the generally received image of the Arab world. These fun diverse clips of Souad as a singer, vixen and girl next door can be representative of the range of arts coming out of the entire region.
This was only the fourth screening of “The Three Disappearances,” and thus the audience felt very lucky to have had the opportunity to be among the first to see it in the classical plush setting of the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill.
Later in the week, was another rare screening, but rare for very different reasons. The Tate Modern screened the experimental films by Moroccan poet, novelist, editor and filmmaker, Ahmed Bouanani. The films, made between 1968 and 1979, are seldom seen. Received through a collaboration with the Cinematheque Tanger, the Tate presented the films as “long overdue for broader international attention.” Stuart Comer, film curator at the Tate Modern, presented the films as “iconic,” adding that “it is shocking that they are not better known and globally received.”
As a literary poet, Bouanani compared the art of filmmaking to that of visual poetry. Among the most powerful of the short films screened in the series was “Memoire 14.” It remixes footage found at the Moroccan Cinema Center in a style referencing the montage theory of filmmaking, juxtaposing independent images that create an overlay of a relational visual narrative. The film’s audio was made up of natural sounds of wind cutting to explosions, matching the imagery back and forth between portraits of indigenous Moroccans living near a mountainous terrain against almost violent industrial activity. All throughout, the film’s audio track will dip into a poem written by Bouanani himself. The film is a beautiful combination of both the visual and literal poetry that Bouanani is respected for.
Music was the other area of great showmanship this week. From popular to indigenous, once again, presentations came from Egypt and Morocco.
Back at the Serpentine Gallery, a dance party lead by popular Egyptian sha’abi music rappers and DJs Sadat, 7a7a and Figo rocked Kensington Gardens. It was organized between the Serpentine Gallery and Bidoun Magazine, a non-profit publication on Arab culture. The party took place under the summer twilight inside this year’s Serpentine architecture pavilion — a structure that placed a beautiful flower garden between four dark walls. Men, women and kids danced as if they were at an Egyptian wedding, jumping, arms in the air and shaking their hips. A truly one off event, it is a wonder if the Royal Gardens’ Hyde Park will ever see such a down home Cairene party like this one ever again.
The Victoria and Albert Museum also presented some traditional music, but again, of a completely different kind. The presentation by pop artist and designer, Hassan Hajjaj, along with young master Simo Lagnawi, focused on the Gnawa culture of northwest Africa. While Hajjaj presented his current project — a series of photography documenting the Gnawa tradition in hyper color — Simo performed various types of Gnawa onstage. Both of them originating from Morocco, they told their personal stories in relation to the music and its spirituality.
Gnawa is a form of Moroccan music that was for a while shunned due to its spiritual association. Today, however, with the Festival of Gnawa in Essouira in its 14th year, this musical culture has been adapted by contemporary, younger musicians and boomed into global popularity.
The Shubbak festival was exciting, diverse and, it must be said, loads of fun. For anyone who was in London there was great interest in the merging with other local festivals, such as the London International Festival of Theater and the London Literature Festival among others, as well as the point of relating Arab history to London. At the risk of reflecting too much on political trendiness, keeping current to today’s political development kept the public interested. Institutions with ongoing Arab programs got the opportunity to receive more notice through their strong and thoughtful debates within their respective disciplines. It is important, however, as Arabs to look closely at how the region and its people are being represented and the types of questions and contexts that take us there. Certainly, there is no single correct way, and the diversity of this program was a great part of the success. But, the question did arise as to why the Arab region has been singled out for this honor.
Shubbak has been widely tipped as an “experiment,” with no plans (at this point) to make it an annual event. Today, at the end of the festival, it is difficult to say how this sudden and sweeping focus on Arab culture will pan out in the long run. Certainly, these three weeks of Arab culture were unique, not only for London but as a festival in a European capital.
