Heliopolis on Earth at the cinema scrimmage

Hadeel al Shalchi

• Last Updated: November 13. 2009 11:27PM UAE / November 13. 2009 7:27PM GMT

The Cairo International Film Festival has staged a glittering return with a roster of international celebrities including Lucy Liu and Salma Hayek. I’m not sure what these celebs do after attending the opening ceremony and receiving their personal tour of the pyramids by the leading archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, but they do add panache to an otherwise shambolic event. The disarray this year was typical – the website still doesn’t work, press conferences hardly allowed any questions, and film starting times were never set.

Thursday night was no different. I and some friends decided to attend the premiere of the independent Egyptian movie, Heliopolis. We had bought our tickets and chosen our seats a day in advance but on the night that didn’t count for much. Seatings were now cancelled, we were informed, and half the people going into the film were journalists who didn’t need tickets anyway.

I stood at the head of an angry mob battling with two bouncers to try to get through to the theatre lobby. The stars of the movie had to be dragged through this clot of humanity, one of them stepping on my friend’s foot as they passed. Reporters with cameras bashed their way to the front. The bouncers allowed some people in after losing their nerve in the face of the oft-used protest: “Do you know who I am!?” The rest of us ticket holders, meanwhile, were left languishing in a growling scrum, pressed against the armpit of the person in front.

But the chaos is a column in itself. On to the movie.

Heliopolis is an independent film shot in pseudo-documentary style and follows the lives of a group of disparate people whose main connection is the suburb of Cairo after which the film is named. Known as Masr el-Gedeeda in Arabic, Heliopolis was built by Belgian architects for expats and rich Egyptians. Its architecture is distinctive and markedly different from other parts of the city. After the Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolution, however, the foreigners left, selling their dainty French and English cafes and restaurants to Egyptians who have turned them into shoe shops and clothing stores.

The star of the film, Khaled Aboul Naga, plays a graduate student researching the suburb around the time of the revolution. Using his hand-held camera, he interviews people on the street and learns from them that “everything was better before the revolution, when the khawagas (foreigners) were still here.”

He visits an old Jewish woman, Vera, who is forced to hide her religion from her neighbours and still relives moments of the grandeur of the old suburb. The younger researcher subtly overlaps with other characters in the film – he happens to be at the same bar as two girls who work in a hostel. One of them is a receptionist, played by the actress Hanan Motwea. Her character watches French satellite TV all day and fantasises about walking through the boulevards of Paris. She lies to her parents, telling them she is working in France, sending them updates of her fake life there with money via a hotel worker. And so on, with a series of characters all trying to find their way through Heliopolis on this one day.

It is beautifully shot, and has a real feel of Cairo. A person who hasn’t visited the city can get a genuine idea of the place through the images – from the suffocating traffic, to the area’s gorgeous architecture, to the real fights between cab drivers on the street.

But while Heliopolis has important messages to convey, they come too late in the film and leave many people bored. By focusing on the emotions and thoughts of its characters, very little happens, and the film moves so slowly you begin to lose sympathy for the desperation of Dr Hany, for example, torn between emigrating to Canada or staying in Egypt with the home and dog he loves.

Close to the end, the realisation that these characters feel their life is at a standstill suddenly hits you. The researcher’s best friend tells him to stop stressing about finishing his project. “Today is like tomorrow, yesterday is like tomorrow,” he tells him, bored and matter-of-factly. Opportunities are scarce, and life is more bearable if you take a drag from a joint, he adds. There is a sadness to these sentiments that can be seen in the faces of many Egyptians you meet back on the streets of Cairo.

Hadeel al Shalchi is a writer for the Associated Press, based in Cairo