A propos de "Dunia" par Jocelyne Saab
«Ce film permet d’évoquer, au-delà d’une simple histoire d’amour impossible, la féminité en Orient, mais aussi la complexité du rapport entre l’homme et la femme, le désir de celle-ci et son impossible plaisir. Les tabous qui entourent depuis toujours les problèmes de sexualité chez la femme, comme ceux concernant la liberté d’expression en Égypte, m’ont conduite à mener une longue bataille politique afin d‘obtenir l’autorisation de tourner au Caire. Sans oublier qu’il m’a fallu aménager le scénario de telle sorte qu’il soit accepté par la censure. J’ai situé l’action au moment où les textes des Mille et une nuits sont interdits de publication et retirés de la vente pour cause de pornographie. Réalité quasi quotidienne au Caire. Quant au problème de l’excision, 97% des femmes sont excisées en Égypte selon Amnesty International. Mais au-delà de l’évocation de ces tabous et de leur poids quotidien, j’ai voulu porter un regard gracieux sur l’Orient afin de lui restituer sa juste place aux yeux de l’Occident. Car ce sont aujourd’hui deux cultures qui s’affrontent par méconnaissance, se heurtent et ne s’invitent pas toujours à un échange, un dialogue qui serait fructueux pour eux tous.»
— Jocelyne Saab
’Dunia’ : a world of controversy wells up in Cairo
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
Interwiew de Jocelyne Saab pour "Kiss not my eyes" (Dunia)
Every day through the end of the Sundance Film Festival, including weekends, indieWIRE will be publishing two interviews with Sundance '06 competition filmmakers. Sixty filmmakers were given the opportunity to participate in an email interview and each was sent the same questions.
Jocelyne Saab directed "Kiss Me Not on the Eyes," screening in the World Cinema Competition: Dramatic section at the '06 Sundance Film Festival.
Please give us information on your background, and what were the circumstances that lead you to become a filmmaker?
I was born and raised in Beirut in the '50s, the golden age of a Lebanon in "dolce vita mode." I started my career hosting a pop music program on the national Lebanese radio that I called "Marsipulami got blue eyes" and from there moved on to become a newsreader for television. When the notorious Lebanese civil war took place , I started working on various independent documentaries until I landed the job of second unit director on Volker Schlondorff's movie on the Lebanese civil war, "Circle of Deceit" in 1981. I continued covering the events of the war as a reporter and filmmaker until I lost everything I had in Beirut, material and not: friends, family, house. I then moved to Paris, France and continued, while being based there, my coverage of conflicts in the Arab world and the Middle East.
Today I live between Paris and Cairo where I wrote, directed and produced the feature film selected for Sundance, "Kiss Me Not on the Eyes" (original title "Dunia"). I learned everything I know about filmmaking on the field. I wrote and directed all of my films, except my first feature film "A Suspended Life," written by Gerard Brach. I studied economics in college, even for my graduate studies, but in parallel, I built a "film culture" due to watching as many films as possible, from the American classics, to the nouvelle vague.
Having reported and witnessed some of the most violent conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century I became extremely concerned with human rights, a theme that I carried with me through my fiction work, and which remains the focus of my latest fiction feature.
Where did the initial idea for your film come from?
About seven years ago, I conducted a study on youth sexuality in Egypt. The idea came to me through similar studies conducted in France and I initially thought that my findings would make a good basis for a three-hour documentary on the topic. As my research progressed though, the findings became harrowing by Arab cultural and moral standards, so much so, that the person in charge of typing the findings refused to do so. Actually it was pretty "out there" by any standard, so I realized that it was impossible to get any of the people interviewed to disclose this information for the camera.
I [then] let it go. I left Egypt for Vietnam, and shot a documentary called "The Lady from Saigon." Yet, as I was sitting there one day, one particular anecdote came back to me... I could not forget this girl, what she talked about and how, framing her head with her hands, the source of many of her pleasures. And I remembered a quote from one of the 14th century Arab poets, "Pleasure is a small death." And I started revisiting these texts, that praised freedom, love and their politics as a way of being, a way of dying, a cultural heritage that we seem to have forgotten.
This led to a new perspective, a potential fiction from all these witness accounts. The stories surrounding FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) and its repercussion on the sex life, and sensuality of women , was my second starting point, and I conducted fresh research with the help of international organizations about the [topic] itself and its related traumatic effects. [Combined with a lot of other] research down the line (concerning the architecture of Cairo, Arab poetry and dance), and the script was awarded the special jury prize for best screenplay at the annual screenplay competition organized by the French National Cinema Centre.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in either developing the project or making the movie?
The challenges in making my film... Where to begin..? The struggles and difficulties surrounding the making of "Kiss Me Not on the Eyes" were unfortunately of epic proportions. It would take pages and pages just to headline each one of them. Suffice it to say though that my main challenges were: To obtain permission to shoot the film on location in Cairo, Egypt as the censorship body fought the scenario fiercely... Considering it to be pornographic. [After the] permission was obtained, the next challenge was to set up production, which usually is quite a task, and being weighed down by such controversy only made it harder.
Then came finding actors, who had to be convinced of assuming responsibilities for their roles. It was a long and hard process as all [the actors were] concerned about their reputation and also their safety. Once casting [was completed], the challenge of having them work in an acting methodology that steers away from the melodramatic school that [dominates] Egyptian cinema is deserving of a headline itself.
Then came post-production. When the controversy first arose before the shoot, our Arab backers walked out on us with all the money [earmarked] for post-production. Finishing the film was only possible due to the help of many people and institutions who believed in the potential and importance of the work.
Today, a new wave of violence and controversy is surrounding the film, [in which] polarized Egyptian public opinion [is resulting in] a love or hate stance and propelling debates concerning freedom of speech and FGM into the public sphere. This whole frenzy culminated with an article recently condemning me to death for tarnishing Egypt's reputation.
Tell us about the moment you found out that you were accepted into Sundance.
I was busy preparing for the premiere of the film in Egypt at the Cairo International Film Festival. I woke up this one fateful morning and sat on the balcony of a friend's houseboat where I stay during my Cairo trips. I was sipping my coffee and staring at the Nile. The sun was shinning, and that instant coffee just tasted better, as I was asking myself, 'why is everything so hard?'
I had been working on this film for over five years now, and every moment had been a struggle. I put an end to my reverie and dragged myself back to the computer screen. I started by checking my mail, and I opened the letter addressed to me by Sundance's Caroline Libresco informing me of my selection. I stared at the screen in disbelief and after a few seconds of utter shock I started banging on the table and screaming. My excitement was beyond words. I was being fought by everyone for daring to dream and realizing this film, and all of a sudden, the best thing that could ever happen to me, happened -- professional recognition by the beacon festival of independent cinema.
My friend came running, asking if I was okay and I could not speak, instead I started banging on the table again simulating the percussion music of my film. I closed the email and kept this a secret for three days. I needed to savor it alone for a while -- to allow it to heal some of the wounds the fight for this film had inflicted upon me. Then I shared it with my crew who had long supported me and believed in this film. Their joy was out of this world. Our efforts and the love that went into making this movie were finally recognized.
What do you hope to get out of the festival, what are your own goals for the experience?
I want to watch all the movies. To be honest this is what excites me most about the prospect of being invited to the festival... the chance to screen and listen to all the experiences of the other filmmakers that found their way into the Sundance family. I am also dying to meet Robert Redford in person. He's always been a favorite of mine. Of course I do hope that my own movie will be well-received, and sold and distributed internationally -- an Arab movie breaking into the international market for its artistic and cinematic value. Maybe the graceful look I carry from the east, beyond the veil of cliches that usually stigmatizes the occidental point-of-view, will allow the orient to be restored in its just and rightful place and value. But all said and done, I still want to watch all the movies and meet everyone above everything else.
What is your definition of independent film?
An independent film is an audiovisual creative process that escapes the norms and boundaries imposed by the industry aspect of filmmaking. It is a film that gets funding from various sources, enough to have it exist, but never to impose any creative decisions. And this is what I tried to achieve with "Kiss Me Not on the Eyes"-- primarily, creative freedom and choice. Of course it wasn't easy
If you were given $10 million to be used for moviemaking, how would you spend it?
Ten million dollars in the Arab world... That would be five movies if I took my latest film as the bar. In the states, ten million is a pretty tight budget though... from what I hear at least. I would have to find the right story for it. But ultimately, with such money I would love to write and direct a modern, highly stylized and political musical, based on the paradigms of Western and Arabic musicals -- modernized, combined, with artists from both worlds singing together.
What are one or two of your New Years resolutions?
My New Year's resolution is two fold. One of which is a bit unrealistic, but they do not call them resolutions for nothing. I want to finish a film in 18-months. A brand new one written and directed [by me] but certainly not produced. And, I want to be surrounded by an excellent crew. I already have the core of it and I wish to [maintain] that feeling of creative bonding.
What are some of your favorite films, and why? What is your top ten list for 2005?
Some of my favorite films : Robert Altman's "Shortcuts" because I love its narrative lines and character constructions, this feeling of having to surrender to his world to "get it " ; Kim ki duk's "The Isle" is a masterpiece of love and death ; "La regle du jeu" by Renoir. I love how he perceives a film as a work-in-progress until the last minute; "In the Mood for Love" by Wong Kar-wai for the sensuality [and] his use of movement and repetition [and] the music the colors, I just love this film. "Seven Samurai" is my favorite epic.
"L'eclipse" by Antonioni. For few people have been able to put in images like he has a metapysical feeling of alienation ; Fellini's " La dolce vita " for his portrayal of a Mediterranean lust for life; Kieslowsky's "Thou shall not Kill. Godard... anything by Godard. Don't ask why he just does it for me. [And], "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" is the most entertaining and aesthetically fulfilling film I have seen recently.
(source : indieWire)
Jocelyne Saab on the ups and downs of her first Egyptian feature
" Dunia" (" Kiss me not on the Eyes" ), Lebanese writer-director Jocelyne Saab' s first Egyptian feature, caused a minor scandal after its Middle East premier at the Cairo Film Festival earlier this month. A week later, this sensuous, loose-limbed film closed its 2005 tour at the Dubai International Film Festival. The surroundings were more amicable but the criticisms remained.
Seen outside the confines of Egypt, " Dunia" lingers in the memory as a visually striking, politically daring film and a monument to Saab' s determination and ingenuity. That doesn' t mean it will appeal to all tastes, of course.
At the center of the plot is Dunia herself (Hanan Turk), a twentysomething woman whose inquisitive, strong-willed, conflicted character has been nurtured in a significantly man-less nuclear family.
First among these strong women is Dunia' s aunt (Aida Riad), who drives a taxi and lives in splendid sensuality with her husband. Complementing this earthiness is the intellectual role model of Dunia' s former literature professor (Sawsan Badr).
On the margins of the plot - and the center of the film' s controversy - are Dunia' s niece and her grandmother. The most distasteful character in the film, the grandmother is the enemy of all things sensual and schemes to have the little girl castrated to nip her nascent sexuality in the bud.
Dunia embodies aspects of all these influences and the film has her navigate through several inchoate desires - intellectual, spiritual, political, social, sexual. The plot diffuses to follow developments in these different facets of her life.
Passionately interested in Sufi poetry, Dunia approaches the charismatic professor Beshir (pop star Mohamed Mounir) to advise her on her final paper at university. He takes her on, and the two commence a high-minded flirtation, spending long hours discussing variations on a theme of physical and spiritual love and union.
Adding to Beshir' s stature is his vocal defense of free speech. After several brave condemnations of those who would presume to repress Egyptian intellectual and artistic liberty, he is one night assaulted by thugs. The attack robs him of his vision, significantly enough, and from this point forward he seldom leaves his rooms. Never fully dressed, his physical needs seen to by a female assistant, Beshir is reduced to a shadow, as it were, of his former self.
Dunia' s mother was a renowned belly dancer, and the daughter shares a passion for dance. At about the same time that she approaches Beshir, Dunia enters a prestigious dance competition - rather unconventionally since she refuses to actually dance during the try-out, which should send up flares to the audience that the script is not-altogether realistic.
The jury accepts her submission and, perhaps aware that not-dancing won' t actually win the competition, Dunia begins to train with her mother' s former dance instructor (film choreographer Walid Aouni).
The third man in Dunia' s life is her boyfriend Mamdouh (Fathy Abdel-Wahab), a fellow university student and, as we eventually discover, a burgeoning architect. Sweet-natured, if unable to commit to a serious relationship, he' s as horny as a dog but keeps their relations chaste - though the thuggish shabaab in Dunia' s building imagine otherwise.
Dunia eventually decides to marry Mamdouh. She wears a paper wedding gown and later - when he overbearingly demands that she withdraw from the dance competition because he doesn' t want all the men in the world to have their eyes on her body - its fabric provides the medium for her declaration of independence from him.
Dunia has mounting difficulty reconciling the triptych of stories arising from her overlapping passions. Her marriage is never consummated, but she loathes the abnegation of sensuality represented by her cousin' s cliterodectomy.
Ultimately Dunia is only able to consummate her disparate passions by integrating them - presaging the return of Beshir' s vision, significantly enough. Much of this business is expressed in metaphorical terms. We never witness Dunia' s competition, for instance, but the film closes with an extended shot of the actress dancing, barefoot and outdoors, in public but with no public audience in evidence.
It' s an appropriate way to close the film since it captures Saab' s major accomplishment - shared with her director of photography Jacques Bouquin and editor Claude Reznik - making a film shot in digital video look as if it were shot in 35mm film.
" It was impossible to shoot in 35mm," said Saab after the Dubai screening, " so we used the DV as if it were a 35mm camera - the same composition, the same trailing shots and so on. They thought I was mad, and the actors were often very uncomfortable with it at first."
When she arrived in Dubai, Saab was still reeling from Cairo, where the post-screening news conference was reduced to a screaming match between her and Khaireya al-Beshlawy, her unusually critical moderator.
Quite apart from her struggles with the Egyptian censors, she said, and an uncooperative press and industry, Saab faced several artistic challenges in making " Dunia."
The first was the script itself, which took five years to research and write. Though the story is completely her own, Saab says she had several Egyptian collaborators.
" I' m very precise in my work," she said, " and I wanted to be authentic in portraying Cairenes' day-to-day lives. Their way of living, their dialect is quite different from Lebanese. I also needed to research Sufi poetry.
" Albert Faraj helped me a lot with the male characters. The film isn' t about these women finding that the men in their lives are bastards. These men are all experiencing crises, struggling against convention. Neither the dance instructor nor the poetry professor is a typical male character."
Mainstream critics dislike " Dunia" because it doesn' t have a tightly-integrated, linear plot. Rather, it has a cast of characters and a central situation from which spin several sub-plots.
Saab' s screenplay is more concerned with showing than telling, a storytelling approach usually preferred to more didactic ones. Saab' s cinematic language is often more allusive than direct, though, and this, combined with the loose plotting, will test the patience of some audiences.
" The structure of the story is based on ' A Thousand and One Nights,' " said Saab. " ' Dunia' isn' t the sort of film to watch with your head. You follow your feelings.
" It' s a great challenge not being able to be direct. It' s hell to film a love scene when the actors are forbidden to touch, when they can' t kiss."
As Saab is a Lebanese filmmaker, " Dunia" may seem evidence of a recent opening-up of the Egyptian film industry. This was best exemplified by last year' s bouquet of first-time features - such as Hala Khalil' s " Best Times" and Oussama Fawzi' s " I Love Cinema."
Saab doesn' t see any evidence of Egyptian cinema opening. " I have one country," she said, " my imagination ... but I fought my way into Egypt. The door wasn' t opened for me.
" It' s not changing because the producers and distributors don' t want any change. It comes down to money. They want to invest at the beginning of the year and have it come back by the end. It does, thanks to the Egyptian poor, people who can afford to pay for the cinema three or four times a year.
" Anyway Lebanese are no strangers to Egyptian cinema. If you back to the 1940s, the Lebanese were among the pioneers of Egyptian film - Youssef Chahine, for instance."
Saab pauses when asked if her being Lebanese had anything to do with the difficulties she faced in Egypt.
" I think 65 percent of the reason we had this trouble comes from the content - the female castration, the lovemaking." She paused again. " About 35 percent was because I' m Lebanese. Part of this is the fact that I' m a woman."
(source : terra.net.lb)
Sortie française prévue Juin 2006. Avant-première le 3 Avril à l'Espace Cardin, 3 Avenue Gabriel, 75008 PARIS
Le public du Festival de films de Fribourg a préféré DUNIA
Le film égyptien de Jocelyne Saab a remporté au Festival inernational de films de Fribourg le Prix du Public ainsi que le Prix du Jury des jeunes. 
DUNIA de Jocelyne Saab, Égypte, a rencontré un énorme succès auprès du public qui lui a accordé son prix, offert par la Direction du développement et de la coopération (DDC), en votant après la projection. De plus, ce film qui nous plonge dans les rues du Caire en nous dévoilant de manière subtile le fait d'être une femme dans le monde islamique contemporain, a conquis les coeurs du Jury des Jeunes (Prix E-Changer) qui « a été touché par les personnages en quête de liberté, de sensualité et d'amour, dans une vision du monde arabo-musulman, loin des a priori occidentaux. Le courage de ces femmes et leur désir d'émancipation ont été remarquablement soulignés. Il a également apprécié la justesse de l'interprétation et le soin apporté aux images. Cet univers teinté de poésie, de musique et de danse. Il l'a beaucoup séduit ».
Polémique autour de "Dunia" de Jocelyne Saab
Le film Dounia et lors de la conférence de presse qui a été donnée à la suite de sa projection au festival international du film à Dubai a soulevé une polémique, des citiques ont qualifié ce film de honte pour l’Egypte… , Hanane Turk qui incarne le rôle principal, a de son côté essayé de donner son point de vue en déclarant que ce film traite de des problèmes rencontrés dans la société arabe, sans porter atteinte à la pudeur comme laissaient entendre certains critiques .
D’autre part la cinéaste du film, la libanaise Jocelyne Saab a a reconnu avoir touché à des sujets tabous, que ce soit les relations amoureuses ou sexuelles des jeunes aujourd'hui, le thème de l'excision ou du plaisir féminin, Mais elle assure que "l'excision", sujet hautement délicat en ةgypte, 
"n'est qu'un prétexte dramaturgique" et non pas le sujet du film. "Le sujet est universel, il ne touche pas seulement l'Orient, j'ai choisi ce qui pouvait rapprocher l'Orient et l'Occident" a-t-elle ajouté.
"Ce film veut ouvrir une voie aux jeunes, c'est la recherche de soi sans tomber dans les archétypes", poursuit la réalisatrice.
Dounia :
Après des études de littérature au Caire, Dounia, jeune égyptienne de 23 ans est à la recherche d’elle-même ; elle souhaite devenir danseuse professionnelle. Dounia, ballottée entre la vie moderne et les traditions ancestrales, cherche sa voie.
C’est au cours d’un casting pour un concours de danse orientale, qu’elle rencontre l’illustre et séduisant Dr Beshir, penseur soufi et homme de lettres. Dounia ne saura danser qu’après avoir découvert dans les bras de cet homme le plaisir des sens, qu'après avoir goûté avec lui au plaisir des mots.
Fiche technique de Dounia :
-Production : Egypte/France/Liban – 2005
- Durée : 1 h 52 mn
– Réalisation : Jocelyne Saab
- Scénario : Jocelyne Saab
- Image : Jacques Bouquin
- Décor : Jocelyne Saab
- Montage : Claude Reznik
- Musique : Jean-Pierre Mas, Patrick Legonie
- Son : Fawzi Thabet
- Interprétation : Hanane Turk, Mohamed Mounir, Aida Riad, Fathi Abdelwahab, Sawsan Badr
(source : Meriem M- babnet.net)
Sortie française prévue Juin 2006. Avant-première le 3 Avril à l'Espace Cardin, 3 Avenue Gabriel, 75008 PARIS
"Dunia", film de Jocelyne Saab
(source : Olivier Barlet pour pour www.africultures.com)
Sortie française prévue Juin 2006. Avant-première le 3 Avril à l'Espace Cardin, 3 Avenue Gabriel, 75008 PARIS
Dunia vu par le Daily Star
'Dunia': Visually striking, politically daring
Jocelyne Saab on the ups and downs of her first Egyptian feature
DUBAI: "Dunia" ("Kiss me not on the Eyes"), Leb-anese writer-director Jocelyne Saab's first Egyptian feature, caused a minor scandal after its Middle East premier at the Cairo Film Festival earlier this month. A week later, this sensuous, loose-limbed film closed its 2005 tour at the Dubai International Film Festival. The surroundings were more amicable but the criticisms remained.
Seen outside the confines of Egypt, "Dunia" lingers in the memory as a visually striking, politically daring film and a monument to Saab's determination and ingenuity. That doesn't mean it will appeal to all tastes, 
of course.
At the center of the plot is Dunia herself (Hanan Turk), a twentysomething woman whose inquisitive, strong-willed, conflicted character has been nurtured in a significantly man-less nuclear family.
First among these strong women is Dunia's aunt (Aida Riad), who drives a taxi and lives in splendid sensuality with her husband. Complementing this earthiness is the intellectual role model of Dunia's 
former literature professor (Sawsan Badr).
On the margins of the plot - and the center of the film's controversy - are Dunia's niece and her grandmother. The most distasteful character in the film, the grandmother is the enemy of all things sensual and schemes to have the little girl castrated to nip her nascent sexuality in the bud.
Dunia embodies aspects of all these influences and the film has her navigate through several inchoate desires - intellectual, spiritual, political, social, sexual. The plot diffuses to follow developments in these different facets of her life.
Passionately interested in Sufi poetry, Dunia approaches the charismatic professor Beshir (pop star Mohamed Mounir) to advise her on her final paper at university. He takes her on, and the two commence a high-minded flirtation, spending long hours discussing variations on a theme of physical and spiritual love and union.
Adding to Beshir's stature is his vocal defense of free speech. After several brave condemnations of those who would presume to repress Egyptian intellectual and artistic liberty, he is one night assaulted by thugs. The attack robs him of his vision, significantly enough, and from this point forward he seldom leaves his rooms. Never fully dressed, his physical needs seen to by a female assistant, Beshir is reduced to a shadow, as it were, of his former self.
Dunia's mother was a renowned belly dancer, and the daughter shares a passion for dance. At about the same time that she approaches Beshir, Dunia enters a prestigious dance competition - rather unconventionally since she refuses to actually dance during the try-out, which should send up flares to the audience that the script is not-altogether realistic.
The jury accepts her submission and, perhaps aware that not-dancing won't actually win the competition, Dunia begins to train with her mother's former dance instructor (film choreographer Walid Aouni).
The third man in Dunia's life is her boyfriend Mamdouh (Fathy Abdel-Wahab), a fellow university student and, as we eventually discover, a burgeoning architect. Sweet-natured, if unable to commit to a serious relationship, he's as horny as a dog but keeps their relations chaste - though the thuggish shabaab in Dunia's building imagine otherwise.
Dunia eventually decides to marry Mamdouh. She wears a paper wedding gown and later - when he overbearingly demands that she withdraw from the dance competition because he doesn't want all the men in the world to have their eyes on her body - its fabric provides the medium for her declaration of independence from him.
Dunia has mounting difficulty reconciling the triptych of stories arising from her overlapping passions. Her marriage is never consummated, but she loathes the abnegation of sensuality represented by her cousin's cliterodectomy.
Ultimately Dunia is only able to consummate her disparate passions by integrating them - presaging the return of Beshir's vision, significantly enough. Much of this business is expressed in metaphorical terms. We never witness Dunia's competition, for instance, but the film closes with an extended shot of the actress dancing, barefoot and outdoors, in public but with no public audience in evidence.
It's an appropriate way to close the film since it captures Saab's major accomplishment - shared with her director of photography Jacques Bouquin and editor Claude Reznik - making a film shot in digital video look as if it were shot in 35mm film.
"It was impossible to shoot in 35mm," said Saab after the Dubai screening, "so we used the DV as if it were a 35mm camera - the same composition, the same trailing shots and so on. They thought I was mad, and the actors were often very uncomfortable with it at first."
When she arrived in Dubai, Saab was still reeling from Cairo, where the post-screening news conference was reduced to a screaming match between her and Khaireya al-Beshlawy, her unusually critical moderator.
Quite apart from her struggles with the Egyptian censors, she said, and an uncooperative press and industry, Saab faced several artistic challenges in making "Dunia."
The first was the script itself, which took five years to research and write. Though the story is completely her own, Saab says she had several Egyptian collaborators.
"I'm very precise in my work," she said, "and I wanted to be authentic in portraying Cairenes' day-to-day lives. Their way of living, their dialect is quite different from Lebanese. I also needed to research Sufi poetry.
"Albert Faraj helped me a lot with the male characters. The film isn't about these women finding that the men in their lives are bastards. These men are all experiencing crises, struggling against convention. Neither the dance instructor nor the poetry professor is a typical male character."
Mainstream critics dislike "Dunia" because it doesn't have a tightly-integrated, linear plot. Rather, it has a cast of characters and a central situation from which spin several sub-plots.
Saab's screenplay is more concerned with showing than telling, a storytelling approach usually preferred to more didactic ones. Saab's cinematic language is often more allusive than direct, though, and this, combined with the loose plotting, will test the patience of some audiences.
"The structure of the story is based on 'A Thousand and One Nights,'" said Saab. "'Dunia' isn't the sort of film to watch with your head. You follow your feelings.
"It's a great challenge not being able to be direct. It's hell to film a love scene when the actors are forbidden to touch, when they can't kiss."
As Saab is a Lebanese filmmaker, "Dunia" may seem evidence of a recent opening-up of the Egyptian film industry. This was best exemplified by last year's bouquet of first-time features - such as Hala Khalil's "Best Times" and Oussama Fawzi's "I Love Cinema."
Saab doesn't see any evidence of Egyptian cinema opening. "I have one country," she said, "my imagination ... but I fought my way into Egypt. The door wasn't opened for me.
"It's not changing because the producers and distributors don't want any change. It comes down to money. They want to invest at the beginning of the year and have it come back by the end. It does, thanks to the Egyptian poor, people who can afford to pay for the cinema three or four times a year.
"Anyway Lebanese are no strangers to Egyptian cinema. If you back to the 1940s, the Lebanese were among the pioneers of Egyptian film - Youssef Chahine, for instance."
Saab pauses when asked if her being Lebanese had anything to do with the difficulties she faced in Egypt.
"I think 65 percent of the reason we had this trouble comes from the content - the female castration, the lovemaking." She paused again. "About 35 percent was because I'm Lebanese. Part of this is the fact that I'm a woman."
The general release of Jocelyne Saab's "Dunia" is expected in early 2006.
By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
"Kiss me not on the eyes" (Dunia) au Sundance Festival Film 2006
The graceful curve of a woman's neck. The seductive jangle of bent gold bracelets sliding onto an arm. Welcome to the world of Dunia, a student of poetry and belly dancing, whose artistic expressiona is inhibited because she cannot experience desire. Mentored by the ardent public intellectual Dr. Beshir (played by Egyptian superstar singer Mohammad Mounir), Dunia begins an all-consuming search for ecstasy in poetry, dance, and music–taking us into the world of women in a society that both fetishizes and oppresses female sexuality. Ultimately, Dunia must confront the traditions that have destroyed her capacity for pleasure before she can experience it. , 2005, 122 Minutes, color
Director:
Jocelyne Saab
This film tackles taboos with an honesty and subtlety seldom seen in contemporary Arab cinema. The female body becomes the nexus of cultural debates raging in Cairo, whether it is being celebrated in dance or poetry, or mutilated through genital excision. That the filmmaker is a woman, a rarity in the Middle East, makes it even more extraordinary. Writer/director Jocelyne Saab deftly evokes the flavor of Egypt, where crowded bazaars pulse with the rhythms of tabla (drum) and heated political argument alike. Saab sets rich imagery–by turns dreamy and earthy, but always evocative–to an intoxicating soundtrack (featuring Mounir and Natacha Atlas) which, like Egypt, mixes up old and new, East and West, to produce a sexy, combustible ride.
— Miranda Yousef
KISS ME NOT ON THE EYES
Lebanon
Screenwriter : Jocelyne Saab
Executive Producer : Jocelyne Saab
Cinematographer : Jacques Bouquin
Cast : Mohammad Mounir, Hanan El Turk, Fathi Abel Wahab, Aida Riad, Sawsan Badr, Walid Aouni
