Yamustafa!

"How a movie ends must be a condensation of the director's attitude towards its events." Tawfik Saleh. Explaining realism, the late Egyptian filmmaker Tawfik Saleh said: "It is the picking up of details and personalities from real life and linking them with a certain 'concern' and presenting this in form and filmic presentation that will raise the awareness of the recipient of that concern." With only six or seven feature films, Saleh was able to rank high in the list of pioneers of realism in Egyptian cinema, along with Youssif Chahine , Salah Abuseif, etc. But Saleh was not a very happy filmmaker, not because of his own belief that he was hated 'in and out and for no obvious reason', but because of his trials and tribulations with authorities and bureaucracies of the Arab world in the late sixties and early seventies when the best production finances had to come from the 'public sector'- read the government! When he wrote the...

Article by:   Taha Elkhalifa* Watching the 2004 Swedish movie  As It Is in Heaven  directed by Kay Pallok, starring Michael Nyqvist as Daniel Dareus and Frida Hallgren as Lena, brings to mind two ideas. The first one is about the  Quiet Revolution  in Canada's Quebec, which denoted the socioeconomic changes in Quebec of the 1960's where the liberals and the leftists were able to ascend to power through election after the death of the late conservative Quebec Premier  Duplessis . Those changes from conservatism to liberalism; from economic backwardness to development and progress were made possible by the nationalization of hydroelectric power from private companies and by imposing a public educational system that ended the sad control of the church over schools, colleges and universities. The second idea that the movie brought to my mind was about the magnificent short story written by the late Colombian writer  Gabriel Garcia Marquez ...