emirates man
apr/mayz 2015
| CULTURE | FILM
46
Rags And Tatters
producer Hany Saqr, all decided to co-produce. We managed to create our own company and we called it Mashroua, which means ‘project’ in Arabic. The company co-produced with Film Clinic and we were able to make the film. It was a risk in the sense that everybody was contributing some amount of money, but not a huge amount. It’s not going to break your heart if the film loses money, but we did it for the joy of trying something new.” As with most other parts of
the Arab world, independent films are difficult to bring to life in Egypt. For Rags and Tatters Yassin worked for free, while the country at large is obsessed with commercial blockbusters. It is a scenario Abdalla knows all too well, having begun his career as a self-taught film editor, working on films such as Sherif Man- dour’s The Mediterranean Man. He worked as an editor for eight years before directing his first film, Heliopolis, in 2009. “It’s hard to raise money,”
says Abdalla, “but we don’t spend much on our films. I be- lieve in low-budget filmmaking, I truly believe that anybody with a small camera and a laptop can be a very good filmmaker. It’s all about the style, the concept and the stories we are going to tell. “But a lot of distributors
don’t like to screen independent films. They prefer to screen more commercial movies, or American
Ahmad Abdalla on set: “I make films for the joy of trying something new”
films, which is something I’m not against, but taking away independent or small budget films just to put in a Hollywood blockbuster because it will make more money is hard on us. For Rags and Tatters the distributors allowed us one week in theatres. And only in eight theatres, which is very small. So we created a so- cial media campaign – we didn’t want to pay for any outdoor advertising or TV commercials – saying the film will be at certain theatres on these days and at this time. And we spread this all over Egypt. Everyone knew where the film would be screened and we managed to have all the
cinemas 75 per cent full for all the screenings. “As an editor I was doing
commercial films, I cannot work with them anymore because they don’t like the independent way – or the new wave – of film- making. Now I am doing what I always wanted to do. “I try in every film to adapt
a different style. When you see Décor you will understand. It’s a black and white film, it adapts the noir era of filmmaking, the camera movement is very slow, and it’s a very hardboiled story. The way the actors are acting too is different. Totally different to Rags And Tatters.
“It is important to change.
I admire young independent filmmakers because they are always able to come up with fresh ideas and new concepts for telling stories, and for me this is very inspiring. I love the director Yousry Nasrallah. In every film he is able to surprise us with something. Every time he has tried something dif- ferent to what he did before, and for me this is the most important thing about making films.”
Decor is released in UAE cinemas April 2
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