The Yacoubian Building (Omaret Yacoubian) - Preview
Preview by Jack Foley
AN EGYPTIAN film based on a popular novel about terrorism and its consequences was among several hit films to be screened at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival.
The Yacoubian Building (Omaret Yacoubian), directed by first-timer Marwan Hamed, is the most expensive Egyptian film ever made. It’s described as a sprawling, star-studded epic that spans all the social classes populating contemporary Cairo over the course of three fast-moving hours.
The film follows the fortunes of a group of characters living in The Yacoubian Building of the title, which was constructed in downtown Cairo in 1937 to house the city’s upper crust (today, it is reportedly a little down-in-the-dumps). In so doing, it tackles topical issues like adultery, political corruption, Islamist terrorism and the hitherto taboo subject of homosexuality in authentic fashion.
According to the Tribeca website, the main characters include Zaki Pasha (Adel Imam), an aging playboy who represents a vanishing world of gentility; a French singer and his former love Christine (Yousra); and Bosnaina (Hind Sabry), a pretty, disillusioned girl who lives on the roof.
The growing influence of Islam in Egypt is dramatized through two controversial storylines. The doorman’s son, Taha (Mohamed Imam), frustrated in his attempts to move up in society, turns to religious fanaticism and ends up training for jihad in a desert camp. Meanwhile, the religious piety of Haj Azzam (Nour El Sherif), who has risen from shoeshine boy to rich businessman, is exposed as a sham that hides only self-interest.
Commenting on the film via the Tribeca website, Deborah Young writes that it’s “as satisfying and enjoyable as a good, long read”, while crediting its frank treatment of homosexuality in the relationship between a newspaper editor and a young soldier as “revolutionary in the context of Egyptian cinema”.
The BBC’s website, meanwhile, refers to the film as “a handsomely staged, ambitious and certainly expensive account of modern life in Cairo”.
The film certainly won many friends at Tribeca and could well become one of the foreign language hits of the year once it secures a global release deal. Indeed, it hasn’t even opened in Egypt. But the director is confident that its many themes will be embraced and that it will avoid needless censorship.
Commenting on the BBC, Hamed said: “It’s not only about terrorism. But each and every other story leads to terrorism also. What happened in the past fifty years, or seventy years, in our society led to terrorism. So the stories are linked and the characters are linked.”
The film is due to open in Egypt in June. It was one of several films to tackle the thorny issue of terrorism at the Tribeca event, including Paul Greengrass’ United 93 (which received its world premiere amid much controversy), and US thriller, Civic Duty, which stars Six Feet Under’s Peter Krause as an American made so paranoid about Arabs that when one moves in next door he resorts to violence.