Egypt' Oscar entry - Clash

[newcastle]

The controversial Egyptian film "Eshtebak" (Clash, 2016) has been selected to represent Egypt at the Oscars next year.

The committee responsible for selecting Egyptian entries convened on Wednesday at the Supreme Council of Culture and decided to recommend the film for the top movie-world competition. The committee is composed of 17 filmmakers and critics, with 12 attending Wednesday's meeting, including filmmaker Khaled Youssef and film critic Tareq al-Shennawy.

http://www.albawaba.com/entertainment/e ... 017-879510


Mohamed Diab's film Clash (Eshtebak), which saw its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, is set to be released across Egypt's cinemas starting Wednesday 27 July.

Film Clinic unveiled the official 97-second trailer which features a police truck containing pro- and anti-government protesters from different political backgrounds, shows their interactions toward each other inside the truck and the clashes outside it.

Produced in 2016, co-written by Khaled Diab and Mohamed Diab, who also serves as director, the film is a co-production between France, Egypt, Germany, and the UAE.

Clash explores the confrontations between pro and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators that emerged following the removal of president Mohamed Morsi from power on 3 July 2013.

Most of the film's events take place inside the eight-meter long police truck crammed with detainees representing different sects of society. Their interactions with each other are full of madness, violence, romance, and comedy.

It's surprising that a film with such a sensitive topic as its backdrop even saw the light of day in the Egypt of today. It wasn't an entirely smooth passage.

Diab listed a number of incidents that led him to believe the film is at the center of many attacks, inlcuding the "National Censorship insisted on putting a sentence with political implications at the beginning of the movie, implying that the film was siding up with a group over another."

He also mentioned "non-stop campaigns at the time of the Cannes Festival, defaming the film," and "the delay in national censorship's agreement and the delay in their agreement to the poster," as evidence of the political blowback from the film.

Clash was also the target of negative criticism on an episode of the television programme Ana Masr, presented by TV host Amany El-Khayat on state-owned Nile TV.

Diab stated that even if all of the above instances are to be seen as coincidences, or even a fear of hysteria, the last incident seems to show bad faith towards the film.

“When the film distributor retreats a few days before the release, and a wide number of cinemas don't show the film's poster even the weekend before its release, I am obligated to think there a lot of coincidences, and maybe this is all done on purpose.”

The director went on to say that a film without a distributor can be removed from cinemas after two or three days under the pretext of unpopularity, suggesting that this was done in order to avoid a national scandal of not screening the film at all.

“If this plan succeeds, I don't think anyone will make movies fighting mainstream opinions, or any opinions at all, because what director wants to risk his money on a project that gets shut down before it can even make any money?” Diab asked.

http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent ... ttack.aspx

The director Mohamed Diab gave a good account of himself & his movie on a recent episode of Hard Talk...available on iPlayer (not, alas, accessible in Egypt).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... m-director