From Kurdistan to Trieste, Lebanon to Sweden, Nablus to Tel Aviv: Mohamed El-Assyouti reviews the journeys inscribed across the screens at Cairo International Film Festival Gianpaolo Tescari's Gli occhi dell'altro (Eyes of the Other, 2004) is set in Trieste, home city of 30-something Barbara Cagli, a dancer and director, who is preparing a show for the National Theatre of Trieste, and 50-something David Grènblatt, a university physics professor and researcher at the Synchrotron, who is preparing an academic paper and happens to be Dutch. Her work is all about physical expression, an exploration of the potentials of the body; his work is all about understanding what he discovers in the world of non-living atoms. Their life is turned upside down when they host 40-something Nadir Bacha, a Muslim Kurdish refugee and friend of Barbara's recently released from prison. Bacha's religion and ethnic origin, his background of political activism, persecution, exile and imprisonment, create an obstacle to communication with the supposedly rational scientist who begins to imagine his guest as, alternately, a terrorist, thief or rapist. Uneasy with his presence in the house alongside both his girlfriend and his nine-year-old daughter, David spies on Bacha when he is asleep, when he is at work, and searches his bags for "evidence". The film explores David's perspective towards the "other": as his suspicions of Bacha are shown time and again to be groundless, his obsession begins to gnaw at his sanity. When Barbara confronts him with his inability "to see through the eyes of the other" the implication is that David cannot bring himself to accept Bacha because he cannot put himself in his position, let alone read what the other's eyes are saying. True, Bacha speaks Italian fluently but he is unable to bring himself to speak about the sufferings of a past that includes being tortured, forced to flee and leaving behind his family. It is only when he is asked by David that Bacha reveals he has three children. As an immigrant and ex-convict Bacha is on the margins of Italian society. When he does find a job he is unable to keep it. He is harassed and abused on the streets. Not only is he jobless, homeless and rejected by society instead of friends he has Barbara and, by extension, David, who rather than attempt to imagine a solution to his problems come easily to believe that it is Bacha himself that constitutes the problem. When he leaves the couples' home their housekeeper tells David not to worry since disinfectant and alcohol will quickly restore cleanliness. "To tip or not to tip, that is the question," philosophises a drunken David to his friends when Bacha, who has finally found a job as a waiter, invites him to dinner. The only position the "other" can occupy is that of servant, though even this provides no guarantee that further humiliation will not be forthcoming. Race and ethnicity are not the only issues involved in David's growing prejudice against Bacha though the supposedly rational scientist easily succumbs to stereotypical versions of the "other"; they are violent by nature, prone to beating men and raping women, especially when they find themselves within that alien environment, the stable domestic setting. But Bacha is also younger than David, and as such constitutes a sexual threat. But it is Bacha's pride, perhaps, that provokes David the most: having initially refused to take money from David, Bacha finally accepts it as a loan, and though jobless when he leaves David's house immediately returns the money. The finalé has David driving his car, knocking down Bacha who was riding a motorcycle. Then there is an alternative ending, with Bacha in the theatre listening to David confess to Barbara about the murder. Did a murder happen or not? The film leaves the audience to consider the possibilities. Director Gianpaolo Tescari and editor Osvaldo Bargero's fast-paced rhythm -- splicing between reality and David's imagination -- brings the audience closer to David's state of mind as his grip on reality becomes increasingly slippery, helped along by Fernando Ciango's cinematography, the low-key chiaroscuro blending with superb performances, especially from the leads Johan Leysen, Lucrezia Lante Della Rovere and Hossein Taheri. It all makes for a worthwhile cinematic experience, even if the film manages neither the suspense nor plot-twists of an American thriller, nor the contemplative sweep of other European films on refugees and paranoia. Lebanese-Swedish director Joseph Fares's semi-autobiographical Zozo focuses on the eponymous 11-year-old protagonist whose parents, brother and sister have perished in the Lebanese Civil War. Zozo seeks a new life in Sweden, where he goes to live with his grandparents. His journey, though, is far less simple than he imagined, and assimilation into a different way of life turns out to be a difficult process. First he has to be initiated into what it means being an alien while at the same time recognising that he is different from his grandfather, who believes he is a fighter. In Lebanon Zozo befriended a chicken that would speak to him: in Sweden he attempts conversations with a pigeon but in vain. In Lebanon he felt ignored by his family, a stranger in the world of grown-ups. It is an estrangement that continues when he does finally arrive in Sweden, most dramatically when he is literally thrown out of the house of a friend by the friend's father. In Lebanon adults would fight amongst themselves; in Sweden it is the older children who beat Zozo in school because he is a foreigner. Eventually, mediated through visions of his mother, Zozo is able to imagine a way other than violence. He succeeds in becoming reconciled with himself and learns how to survive without recourse to the violence that seems to dominate the world of adults. Fares's film is a pleasant coming of age tale with Zozo's rite of passage driving the plot skilfully through violence that always comes from others -- adults, Lebanese guerrillas and Swedish schoolchildren. Hani Abu Assad's Al-Janna Al-Aan (Paradise Now, 2005), a French, German, Dutch, Palestinian co-production, attempts to depict the vacillation afflicting a suicide bomber before he carries out his final, deadly act. It endeavours to both humanise and plumb the psychological depths of two Palestinian youths -- Saïd and Khaled -- recruited to carry out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. The two young men are car mechanics who have no hope of other employment and feel they are exploited as cheap labour in the refugee camp in Nablus. Towards their mission they pass through feelings of enthusiasm, unshakable resolution, self-abnegation, reluctance and disillusionment, though in opposite orders so that, while they remain united by bonds of friendship through most of the film eventually their opposite views of the necessity of the suicide bombing comes to divide them. The film opens with a checkpoint in Nablus. Its closing shot is of a suicide bomber on a bus in Tel Aviv. In between, the details of daily life under occupation -- soldiers with guns, searches at checkpoints, arrests, assassinations, extra judicial executions -- while not explicitly portrayed, constitute part of the dramatic backdrop. And in an early scene the suicide rate in Sweden is mentioned -- high despite the fact that Sweden is a prosperous state -- laying the ground for a closer look at what suicide means. What Abu Assad's film focuses on -- through the characters and dialogue of a screenplay co- scripted by Bero Beyer -- is humiliation. Not political or economic humiliation, but spiritual. Palestinians are condemned to be humiliated, treated by Israel not as human beings, nor even as a real enemy but as an inferior species. And one result of this is that one among the multitude of things they are forced to do that others are not is to become suicide bombers. Committing suicide is the last resort of the individual unable to find any other solution to his intellectual humiliation. Hani Abu Assad's film about Palestinian suicide bombers takes this existentialist dilemma as a starting point and posits carnage as one answer to the overpowering domination of the "other". In the mind of Saïd the fact that his father was seduced by Israeli intelligence to become an informer only to be executed later by the Palestinian resistance as a traitor epitomises his own humiliation. Not only Saïd's present, but his past and possible future, are stigmatised seemingly beyond redemption. To protest against such hopelessness he opts to become a suicide bomber. Khaled, too, has a problematic relationship with his father who, once asked by Israeli soldiers which leg he wanted them to damage actually replied, though he knew they were intent on crippling him whatever. Abu Assad's film does not, in the end, tackle the material oppression of the Palestinians; rather it transcends this to address their spiritual condition. The aspiration to become a martyr, a hero, to go to paradise is a function of the brokenness of spirit. Humiliated, with no hope of solace in the here and now, they are allowed only to live as humiliated and dehumanised beings, swallowing their pride and acting out their inferior fate. Only death can satisfy their broken souls. The film does broach the question of how close the two really are to the paradise they crave, though only Suha, the daughter of a known resistance activist, insists paradise doesn't exist. Khaled, objecting to such blasphemy, insists that "even if paradise exists only in his head" it is worth dying rather than living in defeat and under occupation. The man who recruits both Saïd and Khaled for the suicide mission is perhaps being equally sceptical when Saïd asks "and after the operation, what will happen?" He responds: "Two angels will come down and carry you away. You'll see." The last 24 hours before the mission involve a series of rituals constituting theatrical set- pieces. The two martyrs-to-be sit with their families for a last meal, and then at the end of the ritual sit with the rest of the resistance group arranged into a tableau of the Last Supper. Their beards are shaven and their hair cut. Their bodies are washed as if they are already dead. They hold guns and pose in front of a video camera -- actions they are forced to repeat when it is discovered that the camera's batteries are dead and need to be replaced. This making of a film within the film presents a counter- narrative to the one that will soon unfold on television screens elsewhere: the victims of the bombing will be shown but look, here are the perpetrators, and today they too were whole, not torn apart, though today they chose to be "martyrs" sacrificing themselves for a cause they see as just since they have no other means of resisting the humiliation to which they are daily subjected. The absurdity of the situation, especially when Khaled has to repeat his lines after the batteries fail, leaves Saïd audibly swallowing his saliva, a gesture that becomes a motif signifying his uncertainty, reluctance and fear but also implying, perhaps, an attempt to swallow his broken pride. Later both men, in black suits, are told by other characters that they look like Israeli settlers, or else as if they are going to a wedding. As far as the resistance group is concerned the suicide mission is the long-awaited response to the assassination of one of its leaders. But for Saïd it is a personal matter -- he is avenging his father's own humiliation even though he knows, from an earlier visit to the video store with Suha, that tapes of the execution of traitors like his father, sell for more than those of suicide bombers.
