Amira El-Noshokaty attends a women's film workshop held in Cairo and looks at life through a woman's lens A group of women beg a bus driver to drive on, until one of them takes the initiative and drives herself. A veiled woman is transformed into a flamenco dancer and giggles with her dancing classmates. An overweight girl exercises surrounded by fashion magazines dictating what beauty should look like until she gives up, starts eating junk food, and abandons the magazines. A girl is puzzled by her mother's comments on her appearance and then appears fully made up and ready to go out. Such are the scenes, together with many more, that make up the daily lives of Egyptian women, at least as these are portrayed by the One Minute Film Workshop, an event that was held jointly last week by the Spanish Embassy in Cairo, the Al-Nahda Association for Social and Cultural Development, and Kalakit Arabi, an organisation run by Amal Ramsis, a young Egyptian director of documentary films and the workshop's organiser. In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Ramsis describes how the One Minute Film Workshop had come about and what were its aims. The idea of "one- minute films" came from an idea developed "by a network of women's groups in Spain 10 years ago," she says. The idea was that women who had had no prior experience of filmmaking would be invited to shoot a film for one minute, thus making a one-minute film. "The idea was to suggest a theme and to invite women from all over Spain to take part in making such films," she says, adding that the event quickly grew from modest beginnings and now connects women in France and Italy, as well as, more recently, in Latin America and the Arab world. "Rebels and Wonderers" were the themes of the films made at last week's workshop, the outcome of which included 34 films made by 20 Egyptian women from all walks of life. They represent a kind of panoramic view of Egyptian women's concerns, revealing much about how women use spontaneity and wit to emerge from the status quo and to present different perspectives on life. One of the films completed at last week's workshop, for example, features a completely veiled girl walking in the street, who, when she is sure that no one is looking, jumps onto a passing bicycle and listens to Lebanese singer Nancy Agram's latest hit song. "I think the workshop has been a kind of therapy for all of us who took part," says Mai Bahaa, one of the participants. Bahaa, who works in a Cairo publishing house, put together the workshop's 34 films with various friends, each woman making two minute-long films on both themes. The rest of the participants served as actors, art directors and stylists, building a sense of solidarity among all those who took part. Bahaa's first movie, Birthday, featured the birthday of a 30- year-old woman who remembers how her ex-lover had warned her that if she left him she would end up on the shelf. What the film depicts, however, is this same woman happily celebrating her 30th birthday among her friends. Her second movie depicts girls sitting in a circle and asking questions such as, "when will I grow up," "when will I get married," "when will I have children," "when will I get divorced," and so on. "I think the best thing about the workshop is that it is spontaneous," Bahaa says. "It provides a free space in which women can express their thoughts and concerns, and this is part of its therapeutic aspect." In fact, she adds, when she started going to such workshops, "they changed me. Since only women were allowed to take part, I was able to express myself without reservations. The workshops allowed us to voice our point of view, and after them I felt encouraged to shoot my own documentary film about the homeless people who live in the garden next to where I live." What does the title of the workshop, "Rebels and Wonderers," say about women's lives today? For Ramsis, it is difficult to describe women's lives in Egypt today in a simple way, since a "woman's status is unstable and unclear." The current economic, cultural and educational crisis has also disproportionately affected women, she says, and many either retreat into themselves, becoming more conservative, or feel on the verge of an explosion. "Women today face discrimination and oppression on their own, since there is no obvious movement that clearly articulates their concerns," Ramsis says. While she believes that this is a general problem, in Egypt it is perhaps especially pronounced because there is less freedom of speech and fewer social organisations to rely on. When women's concerns are discussed, it is often just for the sake of having a discussion, rather than with any real intention of seeking solutions, she feels. Egyptian women still suffer from certain stereotypes concerning their roles and capacities, Ramsis believes. However, this stereotyping is not only in others' eyes. It can also originate in "how I see myself," she explains, "how unconsciously, we compare ourselves to a non-realistic model of the perfect woman. This model varies from one country to the next, but the ideal exists everywhere and women tend to see themselves in its light." "Take the definition of a director, for instance," she continues. "Is this just a matter of knowing how to hold a camera, or is it more about having a vision and having experience? Is it just a matter of adopting a certain title for one's work? The problem of self-definition concerns Egyptian women, but it also concerns Egyptian men, many of whom are struggling with being a man. Society expects certain things from men, and if they feel they cannot live up to these things, then the results can be problematic both for men and for others." For Ramsis, the first step towards freeing oneself from the power of such images is to rebel against them. From this rebellion everything else follows. However, she also points to the stereotyping of Arab women in the West, something she has examined in her documentary Just Dreams, which looks at the lives of Egyptian women through their dreams. In showing the film abroad, Ramsis was struck by some of the comments from the audience. While audiences felt that the film showed how similar the lives of Egyptian and foreign women are, a common comment from Western audiences was that "Arab women are oppressed, and Arab women cannot walk in the streets without being veiled. They believed that the veil is not a woman's choice, and that she has no free will. They believed that Arab women follow men's lead in everything, and they thought that it was the West's role to come and set women free." Ramsis's film was designed to combat such ideas, something which she admits is difficult given how distorted the West's view of Arab women can be. "I told people that I wanted to make a movie that explores the dreams of my friends. Since I knew these dreams already, I was hardly setting out to shock or to challenge stereotypes. To me, the realm of dreams was just a particularly rich subject for a film." Nevertheless, one of the functions of films made by women, Ramsis admits, is to challenge the stereotyping of women in many commercial films. In these films, women are often objectified, or portrayed as commodities. Women either do what men tell them, or they are seen only in relation to men. Women in such films have little sexual or other forms of freedom, Ramsis feels, though she admits there are some exceptions, such as in the films of director Magdi Ahmed Ali. However, isn't the very idea of a "women's film festival" and "women's films" in itself a form of ghettoising? Why should women's concerns be so very different from those of men? For Ramsis, "there is a misconception about women's cinema in Egypt. All over the world women's cinema is about films made by women, not necessarily about films about women's issues. Women's cinema does not aim to discriminate. All it aims to do is to show the audience the world from a woman's perspective." Commenting on that perspective, Ramsis says that much remains to be explored about how women will express themselves once the freedom to do so has been fully accorded to them. She feels that there is a lot of rebellion afoot in society today, and says that women today are participating in greater and greater numbers in the current growth of social movements. "Women were not part of this picture six or seven years ago. But today they are," she says.
