I recently had the pleasure of viewing the splendid film Cairo Time, directed by Ruba Nadda, a young Arab-Canadian.The film won Best Canadian Film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009. Despite some clichés and a somewhat orientalist view of Egyptian life, artistically speaking the film is wonderful.
Cairo Time is a romantic drama about a love affair between a young Egyptian man and a young Canadian woman who has left behind an emotionally empty and loveless life to move to Cairo. With its insightful and thrilling cinematic style, Cairo Time reminded me of the golden age of Italian cinema.
The overlapping sights and sounds, which slow down only to speed up again and get loud only to soften, reminded me of some of history's greatest musical symphonies. The film has similarities with classics such as Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice and Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger.
In Cairo Time, Nadda succeeded in capturing the spirit of Cairo with all the depth of its intricate yet balanced contradictions. The film portrays beauty and ugliness in a city where life is vibrant and times are thrilling, unlike the uneventful and tedious daily routines of people living in major industrial countries. The audience gets a sense of Cairo’s bustling character as well as its streets and buildings.
Nevertheless, the question that comes to mind is: “Is the Cairo depicted in Cairo Time coming to an end?”
Many of the Cairene buildings, which were cleverly shot from a distance, are in real life showing decay and disrepair, for instance. Even if the Cairo-regeneration project, which aims to develop Khedive´s Cairo to its former splendor, and other similar projects are successful, the setbacks go much deeper than this.
Is it possible for true creativity to emerge from such a chaotic city? In order for thought, art and knowledge to surface, a minimal amount of order is undeniably essential. What makes the film so impressive is the way in which it showcases the spirit of Cairo and the chaotic times it is passing through as exciting and exhilarating.
In an interview, Nadda said that because of Cairo's chaos, traffic and the stress that ensues, filming was a constant battle. Would it be possible for someone like Nadda to have created such a film if she had been immersed in this focus-shattering-chaos her entire life? There is a huge difference between creative chaos which surfaces when there is freedom of thought and freedom of movement, and destructive chaos which leads to intellectual crippling and social suffocation.
It is this destructive chaos that is capable of completely destroying the fascinating heritage of Cairo. The psychological stress and intellectual ruin that result from this chaos are much more damaging than any decay to the city’s architecture resulting from negligence.
Many people in Egypt cling to abstract religious ideas and dogmas in an attempt to compensate for the loss of order and feelings of security. These ideas contradict the very spirit of religion and the rich heritage that permeates historical Cairo. This city boasts a long history of cultural and intellectual pluralism.
The logic of religious abstraction is in conflict with time and therefore seeks to abolish not only modern scientific discoveries but also the religious heritage accumulated over centuries. This is what happened to the old mosques of Mecca, and what could happen to the tolerant and vibrant city of Cairo.
Translated from the Arabic Edition.
