I Love Cinema
Directed by Oussama Fawzi
2004 | Egypt
Movies might be fictional but somehow the young protagonist of I Love Cinema (Bahib Al-Sima) directed by Oussama Fawzi has his doubts. The young Na‘im asks his conservative Christian father, ‘If I go to hell will I see all the movie actors there?’ He doesn’t have to wait that long when all around him is intrigue, sexual and otherwise, in I Love Cinema, a movie that celebrates the power of cinema within a traditional close-minded community.
Egypt’s Coptic community were outraged when the film was released in 2004. They demonstrated against it and demanded that its production crew be tried in court for contempt of religion’. Al Ahram reported that eleven priests, a Coptic lawyer and reportedly one Muslim lawyer filed a lawsuit against the film, calling for it to be banned.
Before the 2000s, Christian Copts were normally not represented on Egyptian television or in cinema. However after twenty-four Copts were killed in Upper Egypt’s village of al-Kushh in 2000, Egypt’s Ministry of Information wanted to show their involvement in the mainly Muslim country. The first Coptic television serial, Season of Roses (Alwan al-ward, 2000), directed by Samir Saif, showed a mixed marriage between a Christian and Muslim, a scenario that upset the community and led to complaints in court.
According to Viola Shafik in Popular Egyptian Cinema, the country’s censors didn’t want to offend the Coptic Church and wanted to disallow I Love Cinema, a stance that made the country’s filmmaking and going community nervous. People worried that this would bring the influence of the conservative religious establishments to bear on state censorship and the board would no longer be able to act independently.
The film is told from the point of view of the adult, Na‘im, reminiscing about his childhood in the Cairo neighbourhood of Shubra, traditionally home to Christians. It is set on the eve of the Six Day War in 1967. The main problem in Na‘im’s younger life, wrote Shafik, ‘arises from his father ‘Adil’s strict piety. Not only does his father fast most of the year, avoiding cohabitation with his beautiful wife, a painter turned headmistress … he even forbids his family from attending movies because he considers them sinful (haram).’
The stellar performances by ‘Adil (Mahmoud Hemeida) and his wife Nemat (Laila Elwi) included two rare love scenes. Both actors had also worked with Egyptian director Youssef Chahine. I Love Cinema shows the changing of entrenched attitudes during the waning years of Nasser’s reign. Even Na‘im’s father has an experience, which makes him re-consider his religious views and the family is eventually treated to a television set. He takes his son to the movies. The closing minutes of the film pair a bike ride between the two with reports of Egypt’s military defeat by Israel during the Six-Day War.
The offending scenes in I Love Cinema were activities that wouldn’t be shown in church: a kiss between a man and a woman and a wedding party that turns nasty.
When director Fawzi was asked why the Copts reacted so badly to a film, he said, they ‘aren’t used to seeing themselves on the screen, and [they] assumed that because this particular family was portrayed in a certain light in the film, then we are saying that all Copts are like this family. You can’t look at things that way … When you present a production you’re not attempting to generalise and you’re not attempting to reflect society. The aim is drama, is creativity.’
The experience obviously left a bad after-taste. Oussama Fawzi was highly criticized by the Egyptian press when he converted to Islam. Whatever the controversy surrounding the personal decisions of its creators, I Love Cinema remains a brave challenge to societal taboos.
– Malu Halasa
London-based journalist writer and editor Malu Halasa is our writer-in-residence. Keep your eyes peeled for her posts in the run-up and during the festival.
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