Jocelyne Saab’s Egyptian feature on freedom of expression and female castration faces censorship, criticism

Sarah El Sirgany

CAIRO : Three years ago, Lebanese director Jocelyne Saab submitted a script to the Egyptian censor. After an initial ban, constant struggle and a considerable perseverance, Saab successfully completed her Egypt-based feature "Dunia" ("Kiss me Not on the Eyes"). It recently premiered at the Cairo International Film Festival.

The cast of A-list Egyptian talent includes Mohammad Mounir and Hanan Turk. "Dunia" has received international acclaim from different festivals and will be participating in the upcoming Sundance Film Festival. But it stirred controversy when it was screened in Cairo.

The audience and critics attending the screening were divided between those who supported and those who attacked the film. Some accused her of defaming Egypt’s image abroad by shooting scenes in Cairo’s slums. Others were eager to defend her, supporting the film’s stance against female circumcision and its call for intellectual freedom

"I had no messages," said Saab. "My message was to take pleasure in seeing this film and then if you want to think, if you want to change your mind, [if] you want to talk about it, go [ahead]."

The film follows Dunia, literally "World" (Hanan Turk) as she discovers the worlds of poetry and dance. Both symbolize her attempts to venture into life, breaking taboos and discovering her inner self. Mounir plays Professor Beshir, a literaure teacher who "taught her not to be afraid of words," as Saab described, and Walid Aouni plays her dance instructor, who "taught her not to be afraid of her body."

The film jumps from realism to symbolism, using Turk’s and Aouni’s lovely chemistry on the dance floor and Mounir’s poetic recitations to represent ideas the script could not address directly. There are drawbacks to this allusive approach to difficult themes, though, particularly the fact that it leaves some holes in the realistic plot ; some story developments are simply less justified than others.

Saab began as a war reporter. During the Lebanese Civil War, she made several documentaries, and over the course of her career she has also filmed in Egypt, Iran, Kurdistan, the former Spanish Sahara and Vietnam. Saab has some 20 documentaries to her credit and her work has been broadcast on French and other European television networks, as well as in America and Japan, and has earned numerous international awards.

The writer-director made two long features prior to "Dunia" - "Once Upon a Time in Beirut" in 1992-94 and "Suspended Life" in 1985. Saab isn’t unaccustomed to the sort of criticism elicited by "Dunia." She says she was expecting it, in fact.

The writer-director’s efforts to make a film that meet both international and regional festival standards, and was also appropriate for commercial release, were the subject of severe criticism. Her problems didn’t end with the post-production.

Given her much-publicized struggle with the Egyptian censor prior to the film’s release, Saab believes that audiences come to "Dunia" prepared to watch a controversial film and prepared to be critical. Others regard the publicity preceding the event differently.

Film critic Khaireya El Beshlawy moderated a news conference after the Cairo premier that featured Saab and her cast. At that time Beshlawy remarked that there had been so much fuss about the film that viewers - herself included - were prepared to see a better movie. She then said Saab intended to turn the news conference into a promotional event for the film.

It was clearly difficult for both director and cast to have the panel moderated by such a frank critic of the film. The tension between Saab and Beshlawy was palpable, the two women cut each other off and grabbed the microphone from each other.

"I thought we were going to have a press conference," said Saab. "This was not a press conference. It was a panel and it was savage. It was really savage.

"I didn’t know that I would have a moderator which was totally against me. She was crazy. I think the festival didn’t know that this woman would be acting like this. It wasn’t professional at all and I felt destabilized and I became a bit aggressive at the beginning."

For her part, Beshlawy said the director was "very rude [and] very arrogant," and that’s the reason she didn’t support Saab. She also said the film was "not genuine but artificial," and suffered from a "disconnected script."

The main point of controversy in the film is an extremely emotional scene portraying a girl receiving a clitorodectomy and Saab has opined this politically charged subject detracts from some people’s appreciation of the film. "Each country receives the film differently," Saab said. "I think here [the issue people fix on] is circumcision. People are so focused on it that they don’t see the rest."

Saab’s observation was borne out during the panel discussion following the film, when the conversation repeatedly strayed into circumcision.

The more important of the issues raised by the film, according to Mounir, is "intellectual circumcision," not physical. Mounir’s character is a literature professor who suffers repeated physical attacks for expressing his opinions about literature and freedom of expression.

The film is "a dialogue between the body and the soul," said Saab. "The inquiries of a young woman who can’t find something to believe in.

"In poetry," she continued, "there is a philosophical meaning. There’s Sufi poetry and love poetry about the freedom of the body and the freedom of love, desire and ecstasy. Dunia knows how to dance but she doesn’t know how to look deep inside herself to be more beautiful. [The dance instructor] explains to her what her dancing really means."

Repris de Special to The Daily Star