“When Maysarah”… Reality is truer news than cinema

Khaled Youssef ends his film “Hina Maysara” with something like an apology for his inability to monitor reality, which he sees – as he puts it – more distressing than what he presented in his film. Through this, perhaps he aspires to say that there is a lot that the film did not cover in its monitoring of real life that could go beyond Imagination goes out of control of the screen, and it tries to tighten its grip around it.

This introduction comes from the end of the film, which seeks to present a picture of the “slums” that surround Cairo, that is, the housing that the poor occupy randomly, without government planning, or the like, and whose residents, according to Youssef, have now constituted 30% of Cairo’s population.

Before delving into the film “Heena Maysara”, it is necessary to clarify the problem surrounding the film, which I find is coming about something that prompts hypocrisy and laughter from a moral source. I cannot explain it here except from a purely artistic and aesthetic aspect, meaning that judging art through moral standards is written on it. failure; This is because whenever art decides to approach reality, it will inevitably be problematic and meaningless if it does not expose the situation it seeks to depict. Perhaps the sexual communion with which the film begins is not subject to moral analysis here, as much as it goes back to economic conditions that were and still are. The main problem of social relations. In light of the lack of ownership in the slums of Cairo, and the poverty that does not distinguish anyone, it is natural for special social relations to be formed imposed by these conditions. Accordingly, the communism that individuals experience has the potential to affect everything as long as it becomes at the level of a struggle for survival. The law regulating the characters’ daily lives is represented by the phrase “when it is easy.” Everyone is waiting for the Lord of His servants to relieve them, but their conditions are as they are, if not deteriorating daily. The previous clarification aspires to generalization, apart from the extent of the realism of Youssef’s film, which is close to worlds touched upon by many films around the world, such as “City of God” by the Brazilian Fernando Miralles about the shantytowns around Rio de Janeiro, and “Tsotsi” by the South African Kevin Hood about street children in Johannesburg, Without subjecting Youssef’s film to comparison, which would not be in its favour.

Here I must say that the most beautiful thing about “When Maysara” is its distancing itself from preaching and theorizing, and its immersion in the story in which commercialism is combined with documentation and recording of the saying. From the first moment in the film, each character goes about his fate, and the relationship that arises between Adel (Omar Saad) and Nahid is… (Sumaya Al-Khashab) serves as the main story in the film. Adel’s rescue of Nahid from the man who is trying to assault her leads them to sharing a bed, pregnancy and childbirth, and then the young man evades being a father to that son, and Al-Khashab leaves her son on a public transport bus, so the events continue. We find Khashab in the process of transformations dictated by merciless circumstances of homelessness, loss, and poverty, until she takes up prostitution after her desperate attempts to escape from a fate like this, and on a parallel path we follow the fate of Saad and his transformation into the bully in his neighborhood, his cooperation with the police, and then his collision with the security officer ( Ahmed Abdel-Ghani) who frames him for drug possession and puts him in prison. The film continues with the fate of the son who is left on the bus, and who only finds refuge in the street after the family that adopted him abandons him. We also get to know Adel’s mother (Hala Fakher), who is surrounded by countless children. They have both legal and illegal relationships. She is waiting for her son (Rida), who lives in Iraq and appears to be her savior.

The events of the film begin in 1990, and go on, and Iraq remains strongly present. At the moment when Adel defeats the former bully of the neighborhood, and surrounds him with a circle of fire, we see Baghdad being bombed in 1998, as we move from Adel’s fire to the fire of shells raining down on the Iraqi capital, and at the moment when In it, Khashab becomes angry at the hands of a group of young men. Baghdad falls into the hands of the Americans in 2003. The remarkable thing is that the progress of events does not make any change to the children who are being cared for by Umm Adel, as they are children until the end of the film, as if they were decoration and nothing else.

On a parallel line, we see that Ahmed Badir has begun to establish a fundamentalist terrorist organization, since “slums” are the ideal breeding ground for such ideas, and Adel cooperates with him after his release from prison, regains the bully, and exposes security to an ambush upon which he agrees with Badir. This also comes after the security forces abused him and his family in the most heinous ways, including stripping Adel’s mother and sister in front of his eyes, in order to extract confessions related to his brother Reda, who, it is said, has become affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Iraq, without forgetting that the only person who returns from Iraq, returns. A monkey is the harvest of the years he spent there working as a zookeeper. Many things presented in the film take us to characters and events that we have heard of in reality or witnessed similar to them in other films. The fate of Ibn Adel and the life of homelessness that he lives takes us back to Tahani Rashed’s documentary film “The Girls Doll,” which should be a realistic document about street children in Cairo. Perhaps the fate of Ibn Adel in “Heena Maysara” and his relationships with the young men around him finds its reference in Rashid’s film. As for the last scene in the film, it may return us, in one way or another, to what was known as “Al-Turbini,” especially with the presence of the train and the conflict that is depicted on its roof. .

It remains to point out that the film has something to do with it, and it has in the environment that it deals with portraying a dramatic source for building its characters, and perhaps in reality it also finds something that transcends drama into tragedy, and juxtaposes that tragedy with the sarcasm that one must have on the principle of “the evil of calamity is what laughs.” », all the way to the alliance of poverty with oppression, which Youssef shows in its highest manifestations through the security’s dealings with “slums”, certainly adding to it extremism. So poverty, oppression, and extremism, isn’t this trinity the pinnacle of deviation, or is deviation only moral!