Book Meme, last but one entry

28. Bought at my fave independent bookshop.

My fave independent bookshop was sold to a bookstore chain last year, so, you kow, there's that. Among the many books I did buy there was Isabel Bodgan's novel "Der Pfau" (The Peacock in English), which is an entertaining comedy of manners type of tale about a couple of yuppies who in theory are supposed to do management training and team bonding in a Scottish retreat, while in practice things inevitably go wrong.

29. The one I have reread most often.

Good lord, just one? I honestly can't tell. Also, it depends on my age. 13 to 16 years old me reread The Mists of Avalon a lot, for example, but I don't think I have since then. As a child, I repeatedly read (and loved) The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, and then years passed and I didn't read it, and then I read it repeatedly agian in my late 20s. Plus, chances are I've reread the Grimms' Fairy Tales for different reasons in all decades of my life a lot. And so forth. I honestly reread too many books to tell you which of them I've reread most often.


( The other days )

Munich Film Festival I

It's that time of the year again, where I indulge in cinematic bliss. Three of the entries in the Munich Film Festival so far that I've watched:

Of Fathers and Sons, directed by Talal Derki, German-Syrian-Libanese coproduction. A shattering documentary of a Syrian family (or rather, the male part of one, Derki was never allowed near the women in the two and a half years which the documentary covers) whose head belongs the Al-Nusra, an Al-Quaida splinter group. He named his sons for various 9/11 notables and other Al Quaida leaders, starting with Osama, and is thus known in the movie as Abu Osama, Osama's father. The various sons age wise range at first from 12 to 2, and get indoctrinated in lethal ideology left right and centre while the country around them is destroyed ever more. What makes it extra disturbing, though, is that Abu Osama in direct interaction with his sons is a kind and tender father, unabashedly showing his affection. There aren't just hugs but cuddling and kisses. And all this goes along with prepping them for killing and "martyrdom". When he loses part of one leg and some of his sight due to a mine, this does not change his belief in all of it being worth it for final victory one bit, and the two oldest sons are sent to military training. (Bear in mind they're still children.)

As for the sons, here again the fact that they are in many ways when playing among ruins and moon crater like landscapes children makes it extra disturbing. You have moments of childhood magic, as when they figure out the principle of hot air balloons and make an abandoned plastic bag fly, and are full of joy and awe. And then you have scenes where they make their very own bomb out of the plenty of material around them and dare each other to jump on it. (Also full of joy.) Not to mention the time when one catches a bird and eventually decides to practice beheading on it.

In the Q & A afterwards, one question to the director - who filmed this with a single camera man; we don't see him on screen, and his narrative voice is only heard at the beginning and the end, with the rest of the scenes speaking for themselves - was how he could have not exploded (verbally) at some of the things we hear the father say. And he replied: "Because I was attached to my head. I only have the one. Trust me, I knew I head to remain undercover 24/7." The family knew of course that he was shooting a movie, but they thought he agreed with them ideologically. The German producer then added that yes, the ethics of winning someone's trust on false pretenses were debatable, but in this case there was no other way the movie could have been shot with the two people doing the shooting coming out alive. Which, yes. Though I don't think I could have managed to see those children slide into their inevitable doom (for watchers of The Wire, think season 4, only worse) - I don't kid myself that I would have been a hero and tried to save them, just that I emotionally would not have been able to make the movie at all.

Another question cited the scenes where we see Abu Osama talk about the various rebel factions and the government troops, and where we later see some of the captured about to be executed prisoners. The question was how on earth, in the mystical future where Syria is at peace again and maybe some of the refugees return, the survivors of this war are supposed to live with each other again? Talal Derki said he doesn't know. That Syria isn't one country anymore. That it hadn't been possible for Yugoslavia to remain Yugoslavia after the Kosovo war, which lasted less long with less dead. The producer added that one reason why Derki, who is a Syrian living in Germany, went back to Syria to begin with at the start of the film project was that he wanted to figure out whether he could ever live there again with his family. And if the concluding narration of the documentary - "my country, which has become an unrecognizable nightmare" - is anything to go by, he can't.

A Letter to the President ("Namai Ba Rahis Gomhor"), directed by Roya Sadat, produced and shot in Afghanistan: this one I wanted to like far more than I did, because the director is one of the first female Afghan directors, she founded a festival for women in Afghanistan and is a very active feminist. Alas, though, the film, while having a lot of potential, is severely flawed. For starters, it's one of those cases where a director comes from tv and does their first feature, and it shows. But more seriously, it can't decide whose story it wants to tell. The ostensible main character is Soraya, head of a Afghan crime unit, married, mother, who by not handing over two young adulturous lovers to be killed by their village evokes the ire of the local strongman who is in business with her corrupt father-in-law, who in turn pressures his son, her husband, who takes it out on her, and it all ends up with the husband dead and Soraya framed for murder, in prison and scheduled for execution. Which is a solid noir premise! But only half of the movie. The other half is about Bhezad, the photographer in Soraya's crime unit who also is a painter, and in his spare time keeps painting pictures of Soraya. In one of them, he juxtaposes her face on a glass of winel. This is used by her enemies against her as proof she drinks, ruins her reputation and triggers the final fatal argument with her husband. (Bear in mind that both Karim, the husband, and Bhezad do drink alcohol, so the insistence of alcohol consumption being against the law is pointed out as a hypocisy throughout.) The guilt ridden Bhezad tries to prove Soraya's innocence, but the two witnesses he unearthes who might be able to prove Karim's death was an accident are killed, and he's not able to get Soraya a visit from her children (kept by the evil father-in-law) either. As a last, drastic measure, he sows his own lips shut and goes on hunger strike until the President has read Soraya's titular letter detailing the truth. (The President is never referred to by name, btw, but he looks like the current edition.) Now, if Soraya and Bhezad had been treated as co-protagonists from the start, fine, but instead we get a strong opening for Soraya, then Bhezad takes over the entire middle section, and then we get back to Soraya who however due to plot doesn't do anything anymore but suffer in silence.

Lastly, it really feels like a soap a lot of the times. Soraya's father-in-law and the various corrupt officials tell each other their evil plans in "As you know, Bob" style. Bhezad, when visiting Soraya in prison for the first time, shows up at the outside entrance and asks for "Soraya", no last name given, claims to be her lawyer and is let in without anyone blinking or asking for IDs. The plot about the young lovers whom Soraya has saved from execution at the start of the movie never is wrapped up - we don't find out what happened to them after her own arrest. And so forth.

In conclusion: good idea, flawed execution.

Sheikh Jackson, directed by Amr Salama, Egypt. This movie was a delight, and if it's shown in your part of the world, I heartily reccommend it. Present for the Q & A afterwards was the young actor Ahmed Malek, who plays the protagonist in his teenage years, and the fact he was there revealed that a sizable portion of the audience were young Egyptian women living in Munich and already fans of his. Understandably so; it was an excellent, sensitive performance.

Premise of the movie: Khaled, a conservative Egyptian Iman, has a settled life with his flock admiring him, a loving wife and daughter. (Even if she does prefere Beyonce over religious tunes, which reminds him... you'll see.) But the news of Michael Jackson's sudden death triggers a long delayed crisis in him, for Khaled was once upon a time (i.e. in the early 90s) a rebellious teen and fervent Michael Jackson fan, and he really can'd deal with MJ hallucinations showing up when he's leading prayers. It's a movie which manages to be both funny and touching, and fantastically cliché avoiding. Not least by including many female characters and not in cliché ways. The girl young Khaled is secretly crushing on and who gets him into Michael Jackson originally only starts to get interested in him when he doesn't beat up a guy (who has earlier humiliated him) in front of her even though he is temporarily in a position to do so; instead, Khaled endures the ridicule through his macho father by forgiving said guy instead of hitting him, and that's what impresses Sherine. (Who later becomes a successful musician.) Adult Khaled's wife, Aisha, has a great sense of humor, usually employed when he's taking himself too seriously, and as mentioned, he has a daughter, not a son, and appears to have no problems with that. When he's finally persuaded to seek out therapy, the therapist he ends up with turns out to be a woman who shuts down him asking her to wear a scarf during their sessions immediately ("No, and you have no right to ask me that") and then smoothly proceeds to make him face his trauma.

Said trauma starts with his beloved mother dying early in the flashbacks section of the movie, which is about the most traditional thing, except that emotionally, she remains very present for Khaled, who does not belong to the type of film hero for whom "missing parents" equals "missing Dad"). His father starts out as a hedonist whose cheerful machismo turns toxic in his inability to share grief with his son after his wife's death. Another reason why Khaled gets interested in Michael Jackson is that his father denigrates him as a "transvestite"; it's a "who am I?" type of young teenage tale, sure, the way Jackson for a while becomes for Khaled a different way to be male than what his father presents is really well done. The adult Khaled who has repressed a part of himself in order to become the role model people see in him at the start of the movie has to find a way to access this part again, and the final scene with adult Khaled doing the Moonwalk (which young Khaled alrady did in the flashbacks; the actor said they both had to train for three months in order to do it) is so unabashedly joyful that it feels right out of a Broadway musical, and I loved it.

(Egypt, of course is the centre of music and movies in the Arab speaking world.)

Speaking of music, evidently the producers did not have the money to pay for the use of Michael Jackson tunes, and you'd think this would be a major drawback in a movie where the protagonist being a Jackson fan is a key plot point, but no, the creative team gets around that both in tricksy ways (young Khaled sings along with his walkman on, so we the audience only hear his voice), and by composing is own Jackson-influenced music both for the club scenes and for Khaled's two dance sequences at different points of his life.

Another style note: young Khaled lives in Alexandria, adult Khaled in Cairo. The flashbacks to the early 90s in Alexandria are drenched in that type of yellow light which in US movies gets used to signal we're in Mexico or Latin America, but it's also noticable that everyone, male or female, wears far more Western-type modern clothing than in the 2009 Cairo scenes. There was a notable absence of anything like politics or the military in the movie (Egypt today is more or less back to being a military dictatorship), so no, not a searingly realistic picture of present day Egypt, I guess, but I didn't mind since the movie was so good, and incredibly appealing.