Freshman director A.B. Shawky said piecing together financing for a feel-good road movie about an Egyptian leper and his orphan friend was the least of his troubles getting his film to Cannes. The newcomer’s debut feature “Yomeddine” is going toe-to-toe with his ex-professor Spike Lee and Jean-Luc Godard for the Palme d’Or at the world’s premiere film festival.
His touching, upbeat picture tells the story of Beshay, who lives in a leper colony north of Cairo, and his sidekick, Obama, who joins him on a cross-country trek after escaping his overcrowded orphanage.
“It’s my first film, so obviously I didn’t have any record to fall back when I go to financiers,” said the Egyptian-Austrian director, Thursday, who at 32 is the youngest in the competition, “but also I had non-actors who weren’t able to read and the main actor also had leprosy.”
Egypt’s notorious red tape complicated matters – the crew had to wait a month and a half to get a permit to shoot a key scene on a train.
Shawky said he found his lead, Rady Gamal, at the Abu Zaabal Leper Colony, where he made a short documentary in 2008, and was taken with the natural charisma behind his scarred face and disfigured limbs.
“When you live in a secluded leper colony, you’re not used to people staring at you all the time and now you have to stand in front of a camera and have 60 people [on the crew] staring at you all day,” he said, “but by the end of the shoot he was the star. Everybody loved him. He cracks jokes all the time.”
Advances in treatment of leprosy meant its devastating effects may one day make his film a historical relic.
“The older generation,” like Gamal, he said, “that contracted the disease before they came up with a cure for it in the 1980s are basically the last of their kind.”
As for naming the Nubian boy Obama, Shawky said he didn’t aim to get into U.S. politics but to show the global reach of cultural touchstones.
“There’s a scene when they’re on Garbage Mountain [a trash dump] and they see a Newsweek magazine,” he said. “Pop culture is so pervasive. It’s a magazine that was printed in the United States and it ends up on a garbage heap in Egypt.
“I think a lot of people take it for granted how much these popular things affect people on the other side of the world, so you can have a kid named Obama in Egypt.”
European visa problems kept both actors from being able to have their moment in the Cannes limelight, where the film was greeted with a standing ovation.
The film unflinchingly depicts how the most vulnerable members of Egyptian society are treated, but Shawky said he’s not singling out one country. “I lived in New York for six years. Every time I travel I get detained for two hours, being strip-searched and asked questions that have nothing to do with me,” he said. “It’s not unique to Egypt. What I really want to do is highlight marginalized groups ... to give a voice to people who don’t necessarily have anybody to speak for them.”
Shawky and his producer-wife Dina Emam turned to crowdfunding to scrape together the film’s shoestring budget. He also found inspiration from mentors like Lee, whose “BlacKkKlansman” screens in competition next week.
“I talked to him about this film when it was still just an idea,” Shawky said of Lee, who taught him at New York University. “I hope I get to see him while we’re here.”
He admitted that his film’s lighter tone might be an anomaly at the world’s most prestigious cinema showcase, known for its gritty fare.
“I think it’s important that people see a movie and not come out of it completely depressed, especially in an age like this,” he said. “Also it would be a lie because the main characters aren’t like that. The real members of a leper colony don’t wallow in self-pity. They know these are the cards they have been dealt and they just live with it.”
AFP
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