Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg

Mahfouz and directed by Hussein Kamal, Adrift on the Nile is arguably the most realistic depiction of drug use in Egypt, focusing primarily on a group of users from different segments of society (including a lawyer, an actor [Ahmed Ramzy], and a journalist), who gather to drink, party, and smoke hashish from a traditional homemade water pipe (koza) on a houseboat. The story is narrated by Anis Zaki (Emad Hamdi), an embittered petty government official who comments on the nation’s hypocrisy. On an excursion to the ancient ruins at Memphis, the group clambers onto a massive statue—while the women caress its face, the men light up and joke that the statue is also stoned. On the way back, the hedonistic group accidentally runs over a peasant woman with their car. Unable to think clearly, they decide to cover up the incident instead of reporting it, and each of them offers an excuse, blaming the government and then laughing the matter off—an allusion to the moral corruption of the time, involving specifically those who betrayed the ideals of independence and socialism for selfish gain. The final image, Anis—who has finally come to question the group’s behavior—walking through the streets of Cairo shouting, “The peasant woman is dead and we have to turn ourselves in,” is one of the most powerful endings in Egyptian cinema.

      AFGHANISTAN

      Historically, a geographical region contested by European colonial powers, epitomized by the “great game” for control of central Asia between Great Britain and Russia during the 19th century, much of Afghanistan was once part of the Persian Empire, and the western city of Herat, in particular, retains many cultural ties to Iran. The rise of the Taliban and the armed struggle that has continued throughout much of the country since their displacement by American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops following the events of 11 September 2001 resulted in many Afghans fleeing their country, and by 2003, 2.3 million had come to live in Iran, many registered and thus legally present but many others illegally settled. The plight of Afghan refugees has been the subject of, or been part of the background in, many Iranian films, including Baran (Majid Majidi, 2001) and Delbaran (Abolfazl Jalili, 2000). The withdrawal of the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (known commonly as the Iran nuclear deal) in 2018 and the imposition of extensive U.S.-led sanctions on the country toward the end of 2018 caused an economic crisis, whereupon large numbers of Afghans left Iran, either to return to Afghanistan or to cross illegally into Turkey. Bahman Kiarostami captures this moment of return to Afghanistan and its administrative hassles at a border-crossing facility inside Iran in his documentary Exodus (2018).

      In other Iranian films (The White Balloon [Jafar Panahi, 1995]; Taste of Cherry [Abbas Kiarostami, 1997]), Afghan characters play smaller but crucial roles. Iranian filmmakers have also recorded the struggle of the Afghani population within the country. Majidi’s documentary Barefoot to Herat (2002), for example, is shot largely in refugee camps in western Afghanistan, while Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar portrays a Canadian-born woman traveling in the country in search of her suicidal sister, along the way witnessing, as well as experiencing, many aspects of the physical and mental trauma of war, including a striking sequence in which one-legged people compete for prostheses dropped from the sky by helicopter. Although most of the film was shot in Iran, parts were filmed in Afghanistan. This is true too of Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist (1989), about a poor Afghan immigrant to Iran, while his subsequent short film, Afghan Alphabet (2001), portrays girls trying to attain an education denied them by the Taliban. Following the Taliban’s overthrow, Makhmalbaf worked extensively with the indigenous Afghani film community to revive cinema, which, having flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, was completely forbidden under Taliban rule. His daughter, Samira Makhmalbaf, shot her third feature, At Five in the Afternoon, and her contribution to the portmanteau film 09'11"01—September 11 (2002) there. More recently, several Afghan‒Iranian coproductions have been completed; for example, Afghan director Ramin Rasouli’s Lina (2017) and Dogs Did Not Sleep Last Night (2020), currently in production, were both shot largely in Iran.

      A bomb attack on a film screening at the French cultural center in Kabul in 2014 illustrates the continuing challenges of film exhibition in Afghanistan. Today, this is largely restricted to the capital and caters mainly to young men watching industrial films from India and Pakistan. However, in 2019, documentary filmmaker Diana Saqeb Jamal launched I-Khanom, a cinema for women and families, opening with a screening of Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat’s The Orphanage. In May 2019, Sahraa Karimi became the first female general director of the Afghan Film Organization, and in August the Afghan Film Festival, a 10-day event celebrating the 100th anniversary of Afghan independence, took place, screening 100 Afghan and Iranian films.

      AFTER SHAVE (2004)

      Directed by Lebanese Hany Tamba, this satirical short consists of a comedic exchange between Mr. Raymond, a wealthy recluse, and Abu Milad, a traveling barber, as the latter cuts the former’s hair before a mirror in Raymond’s stately home. Abu Milad does not realize that his client is simultaneously conversing with his deceased wife, but the barber is well compensated so pays little heed. Finally, Raymond, prepared to leave home for a romantic rendezvous with his phantom wife, is hit and killed by a car as he tries to cross the street. As the lottery ticket he has just purchased flies into Abu Milad’s hands, Raymond’s ghost proceeds toward his date. Recalling Tamba’s earlier short, Mabrouk Again (2000), and prototypical of his subsequent feature, Melodrama Habibi (2008), After Shave juxtaposes mundane reality with nostalgic fantasy, in turn critically paralleling the disjuncture between the two fields of perception with the cinematic suspension of disbelief.

      AKAD, LÜTFİ Ö. (1916‒2011)

      Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Akad was educated in economics and commerce but quickly quit his job at a bank and started working in the film industry. He wrote and directed his first film, Hit the Whore (1949), an adaptation of a novel about the Turkish War of Independence, with almost no filmmaking experience, only knowledge gleaned from reading Cahiers du cinéma. Akad became an early master of Yeşilçam, developing a methodological and partly Hollywood-inspired realist film language. While Akad directed popular melodramas, comedies, operetta adaptations, and musicals (Give Some Consolation, 1971), he is best known for his trilogy on migration that represents a transition from rural Anatolia to city life. The first film of the trilogy, The Bride (1973), often listed as one of the greatest Turkish films, provides a realistic perspective on the challenges faced by a rural family that migrates to Istanbul. Akad is affiliated with the Turkish National Cinema movement.

      AKAN, TARIK (1949‒2016)

      After winning a magazine’s star contest, Akan began his career as a leading actor in romantic comedies and melodramas. As the number of social realist dramas and leftist films rose slightly during the late 1970s, Akan also took roles in some of these political films. He appears as the handsome protagonist in the popular comedy Blue Beard (Ertem Eğilmez, 1974), about four bums who kidnap a famous singer. In The Herd (Zeki Ökten, 1978), he plays a villager in largely Kurdish southeastern Turkey who helps his neighbors try to take a herd of sheep to a city; in The Way (Şerif Gören, 1981), he plays one of five temporarily released prison inmates, each of whom experiences a different adventure; and in the realist drama The Wrestler (Zeki Ökten, 1984), he plays an oil wrestler who tries to earn a living with his wife.

      AKIN, FATİH (1973–)

      This Turkish German filmmaker was born in Germany and attended the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. Six years after his debut film, Short Sharp Shock (1998), Akın became a prominent transnational and European filmmaker with Head-On (2004), a fast-paced, highly aestheticized love story between a Turkish German woman and man, which was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. He subsequently directed a documentary about the Turkish music world, Crossing