emirates man
apr/may 2015
45
Rags And Tatters
it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival before continuing on the festival circuit, appearing at the Lon- don Film Festival and various others around the world before embedding itself as a classic of the new wave. Although set during the revolution of 2011 and the Tahrir Square protests, the revolution is never directly seen. It appears as snippets of news on Al Jazeera, as plumes of smoke on the horizon, or as a reporter conducting an interview. Abdalla is interested less in the revolution and more in the anarchy that surrounds it, with the movie stalking the peripheries of a Cairo in chaos. It is into this anarchy that an unnamed prisoner – played by Asser Yassin – is thrown, suddenly finding himself free thanks to the city’s descent into lawlessness. Wandering through
Ezbet El Nakhl and the City Of the Dead, dialogue is reduced to a bare minimum, with the majority of scenes all but mute. Yassin’s character never says a word. It is a bold move, and one that Abdalla once explained to Mada Masr. “When we were talking about the style of film- ing, I found a YouTube clip, a clip somebody filmed at the Qasr Al Nile battle on January 25,” he said. “It’s silent. Some error happened and you don’t have any sound, even ambient. It’s three minutes of some of the best kind of storytelling I’ve ever seen. It starts very calm and turns very violent, then you discover that the guy filming is injured, then he continues and talks to the police officer, then he flees and comes back – and you can’t hear anything. That was my first inspiration.” Rags And Tatters echoed
“I believe in low-budget filmmaking, I truly believe that anybody with a small camera and a laptop can be a very good filmmaker”
with post-revolutionary disil- lusionment. Visually stunning, intermittently surreal and imbued with an unnerving sense of confusion, it offered no sense of triumphalism, only the deep reality of a society in turmoil. “I was concerned about the
reasons why the revolution was happening, not about the actual facts of the revolution,” says Abdalla. “Why are we doing this? Why do we have to do this? This story was trying to tell you why it’s important somehow. I was totally against overly romanticising Tahrir Square, although it was a place I loved and I spent nights and nights and nights there. But still, what was happening in Cairo was different and ugly and it was important to shed light on the
Rags And Tatters
story of an anonymous man who finds himself free for the first time, running and rediscovering a city that is rapidly changing.” Was it a risk to make a film
with virtually no dialogue, and one that does not really answer any questions regarding the revolution? “It was a risk, but not when
you make a film with such a low budget,” he replies. “I co-produced this film with my friends because our producer – Mohamed Hefzy – only managed to get half the budget. He told us the film could not be given much money because he didn’t think we’d be able to get our money back. So my friends and I, including the actor Asser Yas- sin, the director of photography Tarek Hefny, and the executive
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