Those People Are Us

The Bush administration regularly reminds us that the "war on terror" isn't being fought against the whole Arab and Muslim world, but only against terrorists (who, of course, are anyone the administration sees convenient to label as such). At a press conference this past September 10, Donald Rumsfeld spoke ineloquently about "a small percentage of people of that religion that are trying to hijack that religion." Small percentage is the defense secretary's bid for sensitivity, but that religion, which he stressed angrily, is more revealing. Like a common bigot, he can't even name what vexes him--won't say Islam or Muslim. We are fighting those people, he says; it's us against them. The very essence of fundamentalism.

In his 1978 book Orientalism and elsewhere, Edward Said had much to say about how depictions of that religion and those people have been and are misrepresented, either demagogically or unwittingly, in the interest of domination and imperialism. Emmanuel Hamon's Selves and Others: A Portrait of Edward Said (Saturday at 4:00 p.m.) is one of 21 features and short films being shown as part of Mizna and Intermedia Arts' second annual Arab Film Festival. Said, who died of leukemia not long after this film was made, is seen in his Manhattan apartment, in his office at Columbia University, and at other spots around the city. Hamon keeps his camera moving, shooting his equable subject from various angles, often jumping from his face to his hands and back in what seems to be an effort to inject movement into a visually static film. But the effort is unnecessary. Said's thinking is so incisive, his critiques so vital, his manner so attractive, that Selves and Others appears as vibrant as the multi-patterned ensembles that the ever elegant Said wears for the interviews.

Said was born in Palestine to an affluent family (his father was a Christian and a U.S. citizen) and spent much of his youth in Cairo. As a teenager, he was sent to a Massachusetts prep school, and he spent the rest of his life in the States. Particularly relevant at this moment are Said's thoughts on the destructive tendency to lay special or exclusive claim on virtues and ideas, as when our leaders say that America is the cradle and propagator of freedom--as if freedom wasn't an ideal found in all cultures (and one that obviously precedes the American Revolution). This exclusivity and the negative corollaries it breeds--that the people of the East, for instance, don't value freedom--is particularly dire when promoted by those with great power. But it's just as bankrupt when used for the boosting of identity politics: Women are inclined toward pacifism, Jews are an especially inquisitive people, Arabs put on better film festivals than the Welsh.

This does, however, seem to be quite a fine film festival. It opens, alas, on a sour note with Egyptian director Hani Khalifa's Sleepless Nights (Sahar Al Leyali) (Thursday at 7:30 p.m.). Khalifa's frank and melodramatic look at the marital and sexual problems of four young upper-crust couples made the movie both a cause célebrè and a blockbuster. A culturally significant bad soap opera, though, is still a bad soap opera. On an opposite aesthetic pole sits Ibrahim Shaddad's "Human Being" (Saturday, part of a shorts presentation at 1:00 p.m.), a wonderful, dialogue-free movie that follows a Sudanese villager from city to country and through deep despair and broad comedy. Scenes of sorrow and joy abut disjointed images in this collagelike half-hour movie, the finest experimental Sudanese film I've ever seen.

Okay--it's the only experimental Sudanese film I've ever seen, but it sets a high standard. Similarly moving is Annemarie Jacir's Rana's Wedding (Saturday at 7:30 p.m., followed by a discussion with the director). Clara Khoury plays Rana, a young Palestinian woman who's suddenly faced with setting her life's course on a tight deadline. Her father, a man of means, gives her a list of five respectable men from which she can pick a bridegroom. If she doesn't want to marry from the A list, she must accompany her father to Cairo. But Rana will only marry for love, and heads out to find her forbidden boyfriend Khalil (Khalifa Natour), a theater director whose charm and wit may or may not exceed his interest in fidelity. Rana has to convince her lover, her father, and herself that she has to get married in a hurry--all the while navigating army roadblocks, violent clashes, unexpected street funerals, interminable encounters with the Israeli bureaucracy, and other realities of occupied Jerusalem. Despite its heroine's rush, Rana's Wedding is leisurely paced (sometimes to a fault), but its unsentimental romanticism is irresistible, and its depiction of a day in the life of a (well-off) second-class citizen is illuminating. It's something like Run Lola Run with more waiting than running, or The Graduate as filtered through Kafka's The Trial.