A tone poem, Director Tamer El Said’s film IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY is a despairing love letter to Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad and all the great cities of the Arab world. Films made about this area are invariably made with western audiences, or at least sensibilities, in mind. This cannot be said about IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY. With a free flowing script, the dialogue is not what you would expect. The themes addressed here are presented without a western filter, and it allows for the audience to be slowly immersed into what is not just an Arab world but ultimately just a human world, with all its love and loss, artifice and pathos intact.
Set in Cairo and ten years in the making, the film follows Khalid (Khalid Abdalla), an erstwhile filmmaker, documenting but not participating in the life of his city while dealing with his own losses and contradictions. With the help of his friends from Beirut and Baghdad (one exiled via Berlin), they all try to make sense of their cities. Shooting over three years spanning from 2008 to 2010, they were not to know the events that were to unfold with the Arab Spring, but it is this that provides the brooding narrative for the film: with snippets of news from the radio interjecting with the unfolding political events, and the build-up of the African Cup clash between Egypt and bitter rivals Algeria. But in many ways, as the impending reality of the political events develop, they appear increasingly absurd against the backdrop of the ordinary lives depicted here; it is the football, if anything, that holds the greater relevance, a metaphor perhaps on being told by the media on what is and is not important, it is just a viewpoint.
As we follow Khalid around the city, Cairo itself becomes a character, developing its own personality. As we listen in on a stolen conversation or the reflection of a character, the city is never still, moving either in blurred background shots, or with a glimpse behind an alley: its noise, hum and rhythm ever present. Slowly the viewer is drawn into this picture of life, before the upheavals of the Arab Spring, its order and daily rituals, are revealed. A time before the chaos that was to follow and remains today.
“Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads”
The picture of Cairo and the humanity that lies within is not one we often get to see, in a world where we are fed round the clock news of disaster and despair. The dialogue is not stereotypical. A soldier explains that they knew he was soldier by the poor quality of his underwear – or a taxi driver says the protesters should get off their arses, and get a job while telling a passer-by to “get out of the way or I’ll fuck your mother”. The conversations are revealing in their attitude to war and loss. In one his friends discuss how war can be good for a city, at least then you’re heightened, hyper alive, rather in the limbo world that they are left with, without resolution. There is a wonderful moment of unscripted dialogue on a rooftop where war, life, women and friendship are discussed, where there is more revelation about Arab reality than in anything you will see made in the West.
There is intimacy here too. There are close ups of faces, wrinkles intact, that have seen several lifetimes. A touch on a sleeve by a girlfriend, or the final breath of a dying mother are all captured to build up an anthology of lives not lived in isolation but as interconnected stories, writ large against the never-ending dynamic of Cairo.
The film does highlight its characters’ own limitations, that of Khalid and the city itself. Late on in the film there are two telling scenes that set a tone. One is where Khalid films, from his high rise flat, a women being beaten on the ground below. He stops filming when he is observed. In the other, a man is beaten and then driven off by the secret police. He is right there, watching but does nothing. It’s a western photographer, barely acknowledged, that takes the photo that will spark future protest. By now we have been immersed into Khalid’s world and his city and wish him to do more but realise that he is just an observer, and like the city, unable to do anything. He’s a pawn in a much greater game of chess that feels uncontrollable, whether this be the socio-economic divide of an oppressed wife or the impending revolution; whether wider Middle East politics or the global self-interest of western interference. As a metaphor for inaction it challenges the viewer to accept what is or to challenge what we know to be happening. Khalid’s inactions speak to his own position and to what life should mean to us, the viewer, if we hold nothing dear.
This is a remarkable film that has been made with great thought and intelligence but mostly love, for an Arab people, its cities and their daily heartbeat. There is an Arab saying: “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads”. Cairo has written to the world – lets hope the rest of the world listens.
httpvh://youtu.be/IiFlSxEGnQU