Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (58) The Arab Cinema Part 2

The Maghreb (Arab West) 

Algeria : Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina b.1934, Merzak Allouache b.1944, Mohamed Chouikh b.1935 Tunisia: Férid Boughedir* b.1944, Abdellatif Ben Ammar, Nouri Bouzid b.1946, Moufida Tiatli* b.1947 Morocco: Souheil Ben Barka b.1942 Jallali Ferhati b.1948 Farida Beniyazid* b.1944

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Brief reports on 6 African cinemas first appeared in the ninth issue of the 'International Film Guide' in 1972. It expanded in 1975 to a contacts listing of 11 countries in a short African dossier.  Reports from Iran and Egypt first appeared in 1974. The 1975 dossier reported that 6 of the 11 countries listed had “no organised film Industry” with 5 - Algeria, Guinea, Senegal, Morocco, and Tunisia - having government supported national film industries post-independence. At this time Egypt was the only Arabian cinema with a substantial history of a film industry spanning more than four decades from its founding in the late1920s.

Three distinctive national cinemas emerged in the Maghreb. The decade preceding independence in 1956 in Tunisia, saw the beginnings of a film culture with the founding of ciné clubs, extensive amateur film making, and the creation of one of two film journals. By the mid1960s, a modern cinema of the Maghreb had come into existence in neighbouring Algeria which Viola Shafik labels “history and national identity revised” and Roy Armes stating that “the roots of this national cinema lie in the liberation struggle that was waged against increasingly ferocious French opposition from 1954 to 1962” (209). Centralisation of control by the National Liberation Front (FLN) over film-making including an independent co-production, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers/La battaglia di Alger (1966), ending in complete nationalisation of the cinema in1969.

Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina

Viola Shafik introduces the concept of Algerian realism by indicating that its prerequisites differ considerably from those of Egyptian realism which was peaking at the time that Algeria's cinema was starting in 1964 “as a child of the war of independence” (144). “Algerian cinema was characterized from the start by a considerable politicization, forming the basis of its revolutionary and didactic character and its constant endeavour to reshape society.”  Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina (1934-2025) is often regarded as having dominated in Algerian filmmaking in its first period of independence as both filmmaker and director of the state filmmaking organisation, the OAA. His major achievement was tracing the development of differing Algerian resistance from the beginning of colonisation until the insurrection in 1954. Lakhdar-Hamina's fourth film, Chronicle of the Year of Embers/Chronique des années de braise  (1975), won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the first African film to do so. A peasant family represents Algeria as a whole in an epic experiencing the three historical phases of colonialism. Lakhdar-Hamina's films are recognised as classics in representation of the struggle for liberation achieved (Spaas 136) which, Armes suggests, “only by echoing Western forms and expenditure [of a relatively] enormous amount of money […] stem less from costs than Lakhdar-Hamina's narrative stance.”

Chronicle of the Years of Embers

Works of this dimension can only be interpreted as epics of national consciousness, but looked at in this light, their inadequacies are clear. They offer little political insight but are rather purely lyrical protests […] Nothing could be more mystifying than [Lakhdar-Hamina's] depictions of the national revolution (Armes 211).

Mohamed Bouamari

“Because of the centralization of control over the development of Algerian cinema, its output [had] a remarkable thematic homogeneity” (ibid 209). By 1971 following the agrarian revolution, land reform began to open up other subjects for a so-called New Cinema (cinema jadid). While the subject of the war was not fully abandoned in the the second phase of Algerian cinema, new concerns emerged In Mohamed Bouamari's first feature, Le Charbonnier/The Charcoal Burner (1972) considered the first example of cinema jadid, a reaction against the Hollywood tone of earlier films.” The central character, Belkacem, a former resistance fighter now works making charcoal but bottled gas is becoming the main fuel so charcoal is no longer needed. The film is about Belkacem's attempts to deal with the new situation and how this affects his relationship with his wife who finds herself empowered by the prospect of work for women in the new textile factory. 

“This new cinema did not abandon allegiance to the cause of Algerian socialism, but with it a new style emerges, focussing on the agrarian revolution” (ibid). A new tone was apparent in Omar Gatlato (1977) the first feature directed by Merzak Allouache. The children of independence fighters having grown up, and the people of the villages have moved to the city. Algiers is no longer divided between the French and Arab quarters. For Omar, both the main character and narrator, the war is a childhood memory of his docker father killed in a port bombardment. His family is poor and depends on Omar's office job. He “attempts to be in control of his life but like everyone else is constrained by social rules” (Spaas). The film offers “a shrewd and humorous look at the lives of contemporary urban youths, at their open passion for music and their hidden fear of women.” Armes finds the assurance shown in Allouache's first film echoed in his subsequent features. “The late 70s also saw a whole range of films looking, at times with sociological exactness, at diverse areas of Algerian society.”

Merzak Allouache

A well-established Algerian writer Assia Djebar (1936-2015) made La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua/The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua (1978) in which she interweaves documentary and staged reconstruction of actual events. Nouba refers to a form of traditional music which allows Djebar to fragment the narrative to let women speak their stories in interviews woven into that of Layla returning from abroad with her child and paralysed husband.

Mohamed Chouikh/Choukri (1935-2003) began as a child actor and then an assistant director also becoming a writer best known for his autobiography 'For Bread Alone', directing his first feature Rupture/Breakdown in 1982 and then writing and directing what Lieve Spaas describes as “three remarkable films.” The first, La Citadelle (1988), begins with a long torch-lit procession above the village for newly married men who are being escorted to their wives waiting for them. The future spouses do not know each other. The film shows the dramatic and decisive moment when, upon lifting the veil, a disappointed husband's fury is unleashed. “The procession's long, slow descent is like a descent into an abyss in which the characters are trapped by a tyrannical social structure, […] marriage portrayed as the central despotic unit.” This is the prelude to the cruelly ironic main drama involving an impoverished outsider, too poor to have a bride, being the victim of a cruel joke involving a pseudo-marriage. “The film denounces the abusive power of an ideology that imposes a monolithic identity on all members of society (ibid). In the three films “Chouikh depicts the conflict between individual and group identity. In each case an individual “fails to find a society with which he can identify” that is respectively destructive. 

Mohamed Chouikh

The third phase of Algerian cinema starting in 1976 lasting until the mid 80s, introduced new themes including the problems of young people, women and marginal groups. There was a greater integration of style and social issues (Spaas 135).

Independence under Sultan Mohammed V in 1954 did not imply any kind of social revolution in Morocco - a cinema of “diversity and changed rhythm” (Shafik). In terms of the film industry the state organisation continued with the forms and structures established when it was under colonial rule in 1944. Although Morocco had by far the richest set of production facilities and a distribution circuit of three hundred film theatres there was no state policy for the film industry which was entirely in the hands of private entrepreneurs. The rate of production was the lowest of the three Maghreb states The first feature was produced in 1968. “The most striking achievements were “a handful of somewhat esoteric works that show formal innovation unmatched in the Arab world” (Armes 213). 

Social mutations mark the work of several filmmakers and give a picture of Moroccan cinema's search for identity (Spaas 149). The situation of women in Islamic society is the main focus in the films of Jilalli Ferhati Poupées de roseaux/River Dolls (1982) and La Plage des enfants perdus/The Beach of Lost Children (1991) and Farida Benlyazid* Une Porte sur le ciel/Gateway to Heaven (1988) while Mohamed Abderrahmane Tazi offers insight into the Moroccan underworld in Le Grand Voyage/The Big Journey (1981)

Souheil Ben Barka

For Armes “the difficulties of sustaining a political stance in the Moroccan situation are revealed clearly in the career of Souheil Ben Barka. He was trained at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and was assistant to several filmmakers including Pier Paolo Pasolini. Ben Barka's first film Les Mille et une mains/A Thousand and One Hands (1972) shows how social conditions drive people into criminal behaviour. In Les Mille, when a highly skilled worker in a carpet factory is killed in an industrial accident, a brutal reality is revealed, the employer refusing to take any responsibility for employee protection or paying compensation while also rejecting the son's request for employment. This drives him to angrily disfigure valuable carpet stock for which he is imprisoned. “Capitalist society is depicted as a ruthless machine in which only the rich and powerful are able to survive” (Shafik). The film with minimal dialogue attracted considerable international interest in European film festivals but failed in Morocco where it was subjected to some censorship leading Ben Barka, as a writer-director, to shift his priorities to making films for the European rather than initially for the Moroccan market. 

Looking at Ben Barka's subsequent career (6 features 1975-2002) up to the fourth, Amok (1982), “a kind of updated version of Alan Paton's account of the horrors of apartheid, 'Cry the Beloved Country',” Roy Armes finds “treatments of the themes not matching their ambitions” (213). In contrast Armes adds that “another European-trained filmmaker Ahmed el-Maanouni emerged in 1978 with The Days, The Days/Alyam! Alyam! giving a vivid and effective semi-documentary look at the contradictions in Moroccan society.” In the late 70s a new trend developed in Moroccan cinema in “the adoption of a more ethnographic approach to film narrative, exemplified by Alyam! Alyam!, in which the director captures the reactions of a farming family in a traditional village when a young member, dreaming of a better life, wants to leave. 

Many Moroccan films dealt with social themes. Moumen Smithi's  El Chergui/The Violent Silence (1975) addresses polygamy in portraying a wife's efforts to stop her husband taking a second wife, ending in tragedy. Smithi rejected conventional film narrative as a product of Western bourgeois society, structuring his narrative around variations on a theme with the intention of generating new forms of thinking.

Roy Armes explains that no clear government priorities, as existed in Algeria, were to be found at independence in Tunisia where, as mentioned above, a film culture was spontaneously evolving. The Carthage Film Festival founded in 1966 was important for African cinema. Cost of production at the mammoth Gammarth studios, set up in 1965, failed to produce revenue in the 60s and 70s, output being limited to two features a year which in the circumstances tended to be isolated projects of considerable range such as Brahim Babai's neorealist inspired  And Tomorrow?/ Wa ghadari? (1972) and Ridha Behi's attack on the cultural impact of tourism in Sun of the Hyenas / Shams al-dibaa (1977). Abdellatif Ben Ammar's 's two features Sejnane (1974) and Aziza (1980) were “probing examinations of Tunisian society.” Later “Nouri Bouzid established a quite distinctive and controversial voice in Arab cinema in his exploration “of many aspects of identity such as religion and sexuality, politics and the community one relates to” (Spaas) in  Rih al-sadd/Man of Ashes (1986), Sofaith min dhahab/Golden Horseshoes (1989) and Beznes (192). 

Moufida Tiatli

Moufida Tiatli, her first feature in collaboration with Nouri Bouzid, Les Silences du palais The Silences of the Palace (1994), successfully focused on the childhood and adolescence of the illegitimate daughter of a palace servant, while the well-known critic Ferid Boughedir made an equally successful personal first fiction feature with Halfaouine (1990) portraying the private world of a family and its immediate neighbourhood through the eyes of a young boy on the threshold of adulthood.

The Mashreq (the Arab East)

There were no national organisations for film production elsewhere in the Mashreq (the Arab East) to match those in Syria and Iraq. In both countries, national sovereignty was practically lost through conflict ending in fragmentation of political control. In Syria the Film Organisation was still supported while Bashar al-Assad held on to power, while film production was in a critical condition. Back in the 90s art house features depended on foreign funding to continue to be made. “Like a number of other Arab countries, the major problem for Arab 'auteur' films was their often difficult relationship with local audiences” (Shafik 267). Another critic, Mayyar al-Roumi, further suggested that filmmakers are “unwilling to understand and meet the needs [and expectations] of local audiences and have taken [too much inspiration] from Bresson and Tarkovsky in internalising the low-brow / high-brow schism, or have fallen prey to all too dominant post-colonial modernist dogmas of 'cultural progress'.” (ibid).

There had been no film production in Syria before World War II. Following independence in the 40s, Armes reports there was a brief flurry of film production activity financed by profits made during wartime trading but these initial efforts were unsuccessful and for a decade (1951-60) no features were completed.” Since the 1963 revolution, Syrian film had two faces. ”On the one hand there was a commercial sector employing expatriate Egyptians which echoed standard Egyptian formulas. On the other, a state organization with control over a limited production program of features and documentaries which, since 1970, offered young directors backing to make their first features” (ibid 268).The only Syrian filmmaker to establish an international reputation over the decade was documentarist, Umar Amiralay (b.1944), who studied at the IDHEC in Paris and made his only feature-length film, “a remarkable documentary study” in 1974, Daily Life in a Syrian Village/Al-hayat al-yawmiyya fi qaria suriyya (Armes 206). At this time production was intermittent in a cinema which was ultimately “left in locked embrace” (Shafik) with a system of state or self-censorship. Artists opposed to Assad's regime or Islamic State largely emigrated. Despite its critical condition before the breakout of revolt in 2011 a few of “what can be classified as art house features” were made (ibid 269). 

Umar Amiralay

A more ambitious and sustained program of state-organised feature film production was followed in Iraq – ultimately “a failed national cinema” (Shafik).  About 20 features were made before 1964 but the scope for exhibition was restricted to the national market due to difficulties elsewhere with the limited comprehensibility of the Iraqi Arabic dialect spoken in the films. There were also failed attempts in the wider market to link big budget co-productions with an authentic national identity (207).

In Lebanon, although cinema attendance in the 50s was the highest in the Arab world (nevertheless in a home market of limited size), film production remained artisanal in nature until the 1960s. State intervention in the Egyptian industry drove many Egyptian producers into exile raising levels of production in Lebanon. Roy Armes quotes a Lebanese critic, Jarod Fabre, writing in 1966, that “the greatest problem of the Lebanese cinema is its lack of national background.” Many former Egyptian assistant and technical staff and even actors had settled permanently in Lebanon with “a cinema in search of a common denominator” (Shafik) amidst cultural diversity in “a mediascape characterised by the cosmopolitanism of its elites.” 

The 70s saw the emergence of number of Western trained Lebanese directors such as  Borhane Alaouié (b.41) with Kafr kasem (1981) a “truly remarkable sombre feature length study of the massacre of a Palestinian community by Israeli troops in 1956” (Armes 206). Writer-director Maroun Baghdadi (1950-93), internationally, was the best known and most successful Lebanese filmmaker of his generation. Increasingly his 18 features as writer-director (and sometimes also producer), 1975-92, were French productions. His first feature, Beirut Oh Beirut/Begroutou el fika (1975), is “an acutely observed Beirut classic” about life in the city on the eve of the civil war praised for “eschewing polemics for universal human values.” French-produced Out of Life/Hors la vie (1991) based on the actual kidnapping of a French photographer, Roger Augue, was awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes. Following a series of short documentaries committed to chronicling the Palestinian struggles (1974-82) Jocelyn Saab* b.45 followed with a feature, The Razor's Edge (1985), set amidst the civil war in Lebanon combining live, staged and fantasy sequences. 

A few talented individuals made their appearance elsewhere in the Mashreq. In Kuwait, Khalid Siddik (b.48), who studied at the Pune Film and television Institute in India, returned to make documentaries for television before finding backing for “two well-received fictional features,” The Cruel Sea/Bas ya bahr (1971) and a Kuwaiti-Sudanese co-production The Wedding of Zein (1976). A few years later, the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs, the subject of innumerable documentaries, found an authentic local voice in Michael Khleifi, born in Nazareth in 1950, studied in Belgium. His feature length documentary, Fertile Memory/Al-dhakira al-khhasba (1980), “revealed a talent to set alongside Alawiya and Umar Amiralay“ (both q.v.) (Armes 208).

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NB This bibliography relates to chapter 6(57) Egypt and the Arab World and chapter 6(58) above

 

Roy Armes Third World Film Making and the West 1987

 ____ ”The Arab World” in The Oxford History of World Cinema 1996 Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith p.661 

Mark Cousins The Story of Film 2004 pp.240-2 

Viola Shafik Arab Cinema History and Cultural Identity 2016 

John Russell Taylor “The Night of Counting the Years “ Sight and Sound Winter 1970-1 

Rod Bishop “Note on The Night of Counting the Years”  Cinema Reborn 2018 online

Adel Darwish “Obituary: Salah Abu-Seif  The Independent 27 June 1996 online 

Hesham Taha “Obituary: Tawfiq Saleh  ahramonline 29 August 2013 online 

Lucia Sorbera, “Note on Al-Makhdu'un /The Dupes; Cinema Reborn 2024 online 

Tahar Cherlaa “Saleh's Cinema as a political act” 1971 reprinted Cinema Reborn 2024 online 

James Vaughan “ Saleh's Formal Strategies”  Senses of Cinema Jan. 2024 online

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NOTE - Renumbering is still due to take place

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links. 

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One

6 (38) East Central Europe - Miklos Jancso

6 (39) East Central Europe - Czechoslovakia

6 (40) East Central Europe - Yugoslavia

6 (41) - The Soviet Union

6 (42) - Asia - Japan - Part One

6 (43) - Japan - Part Two

6 (44) - Japan - Part Three - Shohei Imamura

6 (45) Asia - India Pt 1 - Satyajit Ray

6 (46) Asia - India Pt 2- Ghatak, Dutt, Sen, Parallel Cinema

6 (47) Asia - China - Part 1: Mapping Chinese Cinema 

6(47) Asia- China - Part 2: The Shanghai Revival (1947-1949)

6 (48) - Brazil Pt 1- Cinema Novo, dos Santos, Rocha

6 (49) Brazil Pt 2 - de Andrade, Diegues, Guerra

6(50) - Latin America - Argentina

6 (51) - Chile - Allende and Popular Unity

6 (52) - Latin America - Bolivia, Jorge Sanjine

6 (55) - Cuba

6 (56) - Iran, The Middle East and Africa

6(57) - Egypt and the Arab World

 

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison recommends two new box office hits from China - DEAR YOU (Hongchun Lan) & ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDDLE EAST (Wen Muye)

Something is happening in Chinese Film, after decades of slim pickings. Their two most conspicuous talents have come back on line. Stephen Chow Sing-Chi has made his first film after seven years, Feng Xiaogang is doing serious work again and now, in quick succession, their two major new successes, Dear You and Once Upon a Time in the Middle East 歡迎來龍餐館 (Welcome to the Loong Restaurant) are in our local multiplexes. Of course that’s a suspect qualification. These come to our attention because they are, among the several hundred movies a year made by Chinese film industry, ones we can actually see and they are not aimed at movie enthusiasts. I was the only gweilo in the audience on the crowded opening night of Middle East at the George Centre. There may be better (and there certainly are worse) films and most won’t have the (good) two language export version sub-titles these get.

What is curious is that their accessibility is not the result of endorsement by festivals and film critics. Rotten Tomatoes has yet to acknowledge Middle East. IMDB has a couple of uninformative critics’ notices and some user comments, which once again appeared in a bunch and read as if they gushed out of a press office. At least the flacks have now got their act together on English language spelling and punctuation.

The big surprise was Hongchun Lan’s Gei a ma de qing shu/ Dear You, made on a modest budget in the Teochew regional dialect, while Beijing is trying to project the idea of a homogeneous Mandarin-speaking China. In Singapore, the theatre had to get special permission to screen it in the wake of a 1979 “Speak Mandarin” campaign. It was lying second in the year’s Chinese box office takings at last check.

In this one, young Zheng Runqi is deep in debt and hears about his grandfather who left provincial Chaoshan when menaced by conscription into Kuomintang forces during the Chinese Civil War, sending back qiaopiI/support contributions to his local wife, with letters the now elderly woman keeps in a trunk in her room. As a young emigrant, his grandfather is reputed to have started a second family and become rich out of the line of language schools named after him. Zheng conspires with an uncle to advance him the fare to Singapore, after stealing one of the grandmother’s cherished letters to find the sender’s return address, planning to demand his inheritance.

 Arriving, Zheng and the film both face confusion. Dear You resembles the entries that filled out those eighties Asian Film Festivals. Japanese and Hong Kong titles and were approachable to audiences used to western films. Less “contaminated” viewers were used to different pacing and plot developments while their entries were demanding to outsiders. 

Equipped with synopses and reviews I’m still shaky on some details here. Instead of the predictable pursuit of riches, we lose track of Zheng in a succession of flashbacks to his grandfather (Sitong Li) after his courtship of the younger edition of his grandmother (Xiaohui Wang). His pursuit of her as a traveling propaganda banner girl is particularly nice. In the South Asian new country, things don’t go to plan, including antagonising the daughter of his innkeeper landlord, she also being desired by the aggro professional letter writer, the actually author of the cherished envelopes (if Cyrano is stretching it, compare Kinuyo Tanaka’s 1953's Koibumi/Love Letter) and, still alive, he proves to be a major conduit into the details of the grandfather’s past. At this point, Zheng recedes and we find ourselves following the earlier generation, to the touching meeting with Usha Seamkhum, from the notable 2024 Bangkok Lahn Mah/How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies. She is the one celebrity in a largely non pro. cast, which registers affectingly. 

The play-out title captions contain examples from the now vanished qiaopi industry sending money to original Chinese homes and and significantly financing the war against the Japanese invasion. These actual messages ramp up the already damp eyed content. 

The film has been running for six weeks here, where Feng Xiogang’s I Know Who You Are limped through one. The film has outperformed far bigger budget productions in more widely spoken dialects, being the number two box office performer of the year for a while. More striking, the audience I saw it with didn’t shuffle off into the street at the end but stayed in their seats talking about it and even asked me about my reaction in the elevator afterwards. That all lobs between impressive and phenomenal and would be big news if it were not for a subsequent development. 

Director Wen Muye’s new Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is even more impressive, using a substantiaI budget, with part shooting in IMAX and locations in the Sahara. I don’t get to see enough of these to talk about Chinese best ever but I’d have to go back to the peak years of King Hu to nominate a rival. It has already knocked out heavy competition to take the year’s number two box office champion spot - behind the third film of the Pegasus motor racing movie franchise, which also stars this film’s leading man, established comic Shen Teng. 

This gives the producers a problem. They are using an advertising campaign with a beaming Shen in a chef suit. People have been taking their children and becoming indignant when faced with intense drama. I’d seen Sheng in a few earlier films (Zhang Yimou’s Manjianghong/Full River Red) without paying any particular notice. However in this one, Shen carries a two hours twenty narrative in which he is central, appearing in near to every scene.

 We open with Shen, aged and scarfaced, escorted into an Airport Security Office, after a check reveals an old terrorist charge from which he assures them US authorities had cleared him. This is a script device which allows the film to break up the narrative by flashbacks - particularly effective in skipping over information which would have dissipated their ending. 

Shen first appears as a Chinese master cook, so deep in debt that he abandons his mother (Wei Qing, the only female character to get any attention) and indignant daughter, once again to earn enough to put his life back on track, by working in a Middle East country which is obviously Iraq, here called Bahata. He is collected from the airport by head waiter fellow countryman Jiang Qiming, who has been abroad long enough to pick up the language and the conniving needed to get by. Jiang is alarmed by Shen’s audacity, making demands of authoritative Loong Restaurant owner Sherif Sobhy, with Shen announcing he’s not going to prepare the sweetened imitation Chinese cuisine American customers expect - and that he wants to be a full partner in the business. This face-off between the three is the point that we realise we are seeing something out of the ordinary here, with Jiang amazed at Shen’s daring and brought down because the newcomer’s negotiated the spot Jiang wanted.

However there is another set piece on the way - the first of the cooking segments. Shen is soon preparing the spectacular outdoors iron pot mutton wedding - close ups of a stunt kitchen-worker’s hand’s rung in for the dazzling knife skills. These scenes punctuate the film like musical numbers and rule it off from what we’ve see in material from other sources. Food is constantly foregrounded in Chinese cinema but this must qualify as its most spectacular presentation. The actual kitchen footage is stunning, leaving the Cooking Shows and TV Commercial Product Shots we are used to in its dust - even if one of Shen’s specialties is candied scorpions.

Middle East has something more startling. The film’s real set piece occurs early, when the comparative calm is destroyed with a sudden 9/11 retaliation bombing raid. Entire city blocks explode around the leads, running for their lives, stamping on the head of a dead man in their panic. This is one of the most shocking pieces of film ever and it is an act of supreme confidence that the makers place it so early - like burning Atlanta before the interval.

Complications ensue with the children from the orphanage run by Jiang’s lady friend, now without shelter. Shen is equal to the challenge and soon has them sleeping on the floor and waiting tables in Loong Restaurant uniforms. Hang the child labor laws! Pilfering teenager Omar Sherif is caught out and abused for taking supplies when they are desperately short but that turns into one of the film’s most compelling sub plots. One of the strengths is the way of introducing characters as bit players, only to reveal they represent major plot elements. We are however getting ahead of ourselves.

Their needs mean contact with the black market which will make the operation boom when the Ba’athist Government falls and Sobhy becomes an official under the American occupation. Shen clears his debts but is lured by the cash flow from manipulating supplies, keeping The Loong Restaurant open on power permits Sobhy connives while their competitors have gone dark and serves liquor in a country where it’s forbidden. 

However they are operating just outside the Green Zone, living with violence and danger. The proximity of military prison Camp Alifah reveals insurgent leader Ahmed Salim, “The Headmaster” strung up naked, with Shen able to ease some of his suffering by faking the chilli water jailers funnel into him. At this point the post is over run and roles reversed with Shen struggling to prevent his own young deputy taking savage revenge. 

What is already a strong drama is further powered up by the introduction of child soldiers in training. Wen Muye's care in finding the most vulnerable and appealing looking young performers is deliberate. A checkpoint bombing is as startling as its counterpart in Raffi Pitts’ Soy Negro - which I notice no one has still been sufficiently enterprising to show here. We get the “Open Your mouth!” and “I promised God five children” scenes.

 

Of course, coming from a Chinese Marxist society the question is not just how good it is but what is it telling us. The Party Newspaper has reportedly endorsed this one. The film shows Americans in a country where they have no place to be, dying in encounters which provoke drunken survivors to murderous rage. But they are also pitiful, victims of power politics they will never understand. The Jihadis come out of things even worse, justifying their barbarism with allegiance to a God the film makers don’t believe exists. Though no one mentions El Qaida or Abu Ghraib, these are clearly models. The Chinese characters crave a peace which harms no one. Can’t argue with that, though how far it all corresponds with reality is something to question in some other space.

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is a mix of expat. drama, military spectacle, imposing Egyptian performers, Soy Negro and Gone With the Wind - only with candied scorpions. It is a movie everyone should see but not everyone will enjoy. Either way, anyone with a serious interest in film, or for that matter a casual one, should rush down to the local multiplex and watch it.