The Tunisian and Egyptian Revolution is not as surprising as it seems. It is the result of a progressive process that was going on for a while. The uprisings are only the emergent part of the iceberg. During decades frustration was growing until the point of no-return. In the cultural field for example, things were already going on for years. The world re-discovers now, what the youth was trying to build in the underground and what associations and corporations where trying to make, despite deaf dictatorships. A demand of change was formulated by the people and artists did listen to the youth and tried to give it the voice it was denied.
Cinema is the most obvious example of this process. The crowds of young people that the world suddenly saw in the streets and the central squares of Tunis, Cairo and Alexandria are the same ones that you could see in recent films made by Nouri Bouzid, Fadhel Jaibi, Ahamad Abdalla and Ahamad Rashwan. These filmmakers witnessed the grumbling of the volcano before it erupted. They witnessed the deep changes of their societies although they were ‘… occulted by the clichés the Western World developed about the Middle-East and North Africa’, writes Olivier Roy about what he calls ‘post-islamist revolution’. These artists were able to see what the world did not dare to see or did not want to see.
Mostly it is about independent productions focusing on the suffocating atmosphere, the youth’s frustrating daily life due to the power of the police. Young people were prevented not only from their political and civil rights but also from any possibility of artistic creativity. Poverty, frustration and marginalization of young people pushed them into the spiral of violence. This is what we can see in films like Making of… kamikaze (2006) by Nouri Bouzid, Junun (2005) by Fadhel Jaibi, Microphone (2010) by Ahmad Abdalla, Basra (2008) by Ahamad Rashwan and Hawi (2011) by Ibrahim El-Batout.
Looking at these films now, after the eruption of the societies in Tunisia and Egypt, completes the full image of the Tunisian and Egyptian youth who made the change. Bahta in Bouzid’s film blows himself up after being involved in a kind of vicious circle made of unemployment, police oppression and fundamentalist brainwashing. In Microphone the icon of the power, the director of the cultural center who refuses to finance performances unless they fit into the ‘politically correct’, is turned into irony by groups of young artists and has to face the signs of an uprising. Now, such films can be seen as prophecies of the uprising of these societies.
They are also the concrete product of a slow movement against a draconian system of censorship. In Tunisia, filmmakers were trying to change things using the rules of the cultural policy. In Egypt, where cinema is one of the most organized industries in the world, a new generation started to look for a renewal out of the traditional circuit of production: on the one hand they strength the critical tone of their films, on the other hand they seek an independent production process.
In Tunisia, same as in Egypt, we witness a big number of short films made by a new generation of filmmakers who are structurally independent from the traditional financing system of film production thanks to video technology. In Tunisia the record of 80 shorts could be reached in one year, while the average of the usual Tunisian potential does not exceed 10 films. The same phenomenon could be proportionally found in other countries like Morocco and Algeria.
The Egyptian filmmakers mentioned above are examples of this tendency of independence. They are relatively young, they make their first features and they adopt the spirit of small budget production. At the same time they are involved in a kind of informal groups of young filmmakers, recently coming out of film schools. This is what films like Microphone, Hawi and Basra are explicitly about. They depict a young generation of artists trying to find their ways despite the jungle of the mainstream film and art industry. All these phenomenon’s can be seen as signs of the deep change that these societies were facing.
In Tunisia, the policy of culture started already to move slowly a few months before the uprising. A reform of the film sector was put on the table of a National Commission for the Reform and the Development of Cinema and the Audiovisual Industry. The fact is that this plan was a way to outguess the real demand of the youth. They reacted by standing as a kind of ‘propositional force’. The idea was that a real reform can not come as an exclusive official policy without a real connection to the ground.
On January 25th, a big meeting of film professionals took place. Symbolically it was a revival act of Tunisian cinema: the filmmakers took possession/repossession of the Association of Tunisian Filmmakers which was for decades confiscated by a group of people helped by the former regime. Since that date the new team started to make a plan to work on a new policy of cinema in the country considering that: ‘The former regime has been the enemy number one of freedom. Among others, the freedom of creation, especially in cinema, has been oppressed. This oppression operated both on a creative and socio-professional level for the film workers who have been marginalized over the years, who have been demonized, censured, deprived of their rights, etc.’
This is the case in Tunisia, but it is also a perfect example of the mechanism of change in Arab societies. When King Mohamed VI of Morocco decides to engage a huge and deep political and social reform in the country, it is not a personal decision coming from a political will; it is a reaction to the demand formulated by Moroccan society, not only after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, but for decades. The uprising of Arab populations is an ongoing process, not its beginning. The revolution is not a fact of a few days of ‘sit ins’ and demonstrations, it is a deep and long mechanism of claims of change.
It needs time to clean up the brainwashing operating for decades in these societies. Artists are continuing the work of change that started before the events. The big change already is that there is more hope and more trust in the future as far as it is under the power of the artists themselves. As a matter of fact, a new constitution is going to be voted in Tunisia in July 2011. The film and cultural policy should be on the agenda of the new government by then. And this is one of the victories.
To see also on th blog of Boekman Foundation: www.boekman.nl
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