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When Arabs Danced - Film Visions du Réel Weds 18th April

Writer's picture: CatherineCatherine

"I am a dancer, music soothes our soul, but not the soul of our censors", says a teenager in a school in Egypt. We hear the voice of someone speaking on the radio, "There is no scholar that allows you to listen to the lyrics of Madonna and Beyoncé and Michael Jackson and those kinds of people. They are horrible and dirty, they encourage you to move your body and shake your thing". "My wife loved to dance - there were as many shoes in front of the house as outside a mosque," laments the husband of an elderly couple living in Morocco. "Islam teaches us to "glide" through life but yet we can't dance. Being a dancer is something to be ashamed of", says a traditional belly dancer in Egypt. But things weren't always like this for dancers and actors in their respective countries. With archive footage director Jawad Rhalib shows in this film that in the 1960's and 1970's people could dance. However, the rules are now changing which is making life tough for some young Muslim artists. A group of male and female actors living in Belgium rehearse a stage adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s book Submission. They discuss the complexities of how to represent the main Muslim character on stage but they also question if they should alter some of the text and change some of the performance in the play to avoid upsetting fundamentalists. Along with the restriction on dance, other restrictions have crept into the personal lives of women in the countries featured in the film. We see an archive clip of President Nasser of Egypt telling a story of when he met with the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser recounts; "The leader listed his requests. What did he ask of me?  You must make the hijab mandatory in Egypt and order every woman in the street to wear a headscarf. So I told him, "Sir you have a daughter studying medicine, she doesn't wear a headscarf, why don't you make her wear one?  If you can't make your own daughter wear a headscarf, how do you expect me to make 10 million Egyptian women do it? There is much laughter from his audience at the absurdity of the idea and then the camera switches to a scene in present-day Egypt where virtually every woman in the director's lens is wearing a hijab and then on to a class of young children being told by their religious teacher not to watch movies that will lead them astray as they are the "work of the devil" and how non-religious films are forbidden to them. An Iranian young woman living in Belgium discusses with her mother what life used to be like in Iran. When she is with her friends, they talk about how they have to adapt and change when they visit the country today. Interspersed between the interviews with artists and dancers and the difficulties they face, there are also some lovely dance scenes in this film, beautiful sensual modern ballet accompanied by gentle piano music. The traditional belly dancer then performs to the camera. This a fascinating and courageous film.

Living in Nyon was not at the film' first screening in Gland, however, Trish Thalman (an occasional correspondent for this site) was present and reports back that there were lots of questions for the director at the discussion at the end of the film from how he managed to film some of the scenes, on how safe the actors and dancers would be after the screening of the film, to the reaction of their relatives. The film will be screened again on Wednesday 18th April at the Théâtre de Marens at 16:30 

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