Histories of South-South Film Circulation

By Ifdal Elsaket

In June this year, a group of curators, cultural practitioners, and filmmakers came together in Cairo for a Global South Programmer’s Meeting, where they discussed the politics of programming, festivals, and the history of South-South distribution. A look back at the Afro-Asian Film Festival, which ran from 1958 until 1963, informed and inspired the discussions at the meeting. During the meeting, a range of questions were raised about the politics of programming, film circulation, audiences, and the global politics of solidarity. The conversations exposed the faultlines around international film trade and the politics of exhibition in moments of political crisis and transition. They also raised questions about what a study of the Afro-Asian Film Festival can tell us about the possibilities of and constraints on south-south cinematic exchange.

This meeting took place amidst Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and Palestine was on everyone’s minds. In light of this, multiple questions were raised. What role does cinema play in advancing the cause of liberational politics when, historically speaking, in the hands of its most powerful players - distributors, film studios, and indeed cinema owners - it played a large role in dehumanizing Arabs and Palestinians, obfuscating reality, disappearing alternative narratives and conditioning people to this genocide? During the meeting one of the participants and speakers spoke of film as a genocidal tool. Even when films are made to counter this legacy, the reels are snatched away (the rich work of the Palestine Film Unit was looted by Israel in 1982) or have limited commercial global release.

One of the main questions raised during the meeting was how examining the historical attempts to create alternative networks of film circulation, can act as a launchpad to help us understand or disrupt dominant modes of exhibition and distribution. What can cinema programming tell us about a particular moment? How do programmers contend with the political and economic conditions of their times? Today, what does it mean to have South-South exchange in a context where media conglomerates and European funding schemes shape the cinema landscape, and when cinema-going is at an all-time low. A textured history of the film trade can help us nuance our understanding of cinema exhibition, and contend with what cinema means to people in the everyday.

Over the past decade or so, new scholarship has shed light on the role played by cultural practitioners during the 1950s and 1960s era of decolonisation. Of particular interest are the initiatives and projects that emerged from the Bandung Conference of 1955 and coalesced around the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), established two years later. The AAPSO, founded in Cairo in 1957, met, in the words of Anwar Sadat, who opened its inaugural conference, “partly in honour of the spirit of Bandung and as a reminder of the principles and ideals it stands for, and partly to push it a step forward.” The organization facilitated cultural and intellectual exchange between formerly colonised nations and initiated a series of conferences, festivals, and collaborative projects.

It is not surprising that Cairo became a hub of Afro-Asian exchange. After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952, Egypt was swept up in a fervour of nationalist anti-colonialism. It soon positioned itself at the centre of a global anti-colonial movement. In 1956, it took on Israel and the remnants of the British and French empires during the Tripartite Aggression, propelling President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser into the international spotlight as a charismatic anti-colonial leader. Egypt was redefining its geographic imaginary. Egypt and Syria formed a union in 1958, and the rhetoric of Pan-Arabism was at its height. It was a decade of conferences and summits, of finding new avenues of collaboration and reimagining the Arab landscape. Notwithstanding tightening restrictions at home, the Egyptian press was awash with news of liberation movements in Africa and Asia.

Of interest to film scholars and historians in this context is the Afro-Asian Film Festival. Except in some niche academic circles, the festival has long been overlooked, a forgotten ‘third world’ experiment, criss-crossing south-south networks and exchange, fraught with tensions and wonderfully hopeful, organized three times (Tashkent in 1958, Cairo in 1960, and Jakarta in 1963) before it ended in a haze of faded momentum.

In the Arab world, in general, a historic understanding of the film distribution networks and festival circuits has not been fully developed. Histories of film programming, even in commercial cinemas, are also rare. The focus of much research has often been on film production - with an interest in film aesthetics, directors, or stars. The work of programmers and exhibitors, those silent engines behind the cinematic experience, is seldom understood. In this context, the 2nd edition of the Afro-Asian Film Festival, Cairo’s first-ever international film festival, seemed to have also fallen on the wayside of cultural and historical memory. Even as research on 1960s cinematic production is prolific, the festival barely gets mentioned. During the meeting, Ahmad Refaat, one of the speakers at the meeting, argued that the festival was not given serious coverage, sharing titbits about the media’s disinterest in the festival itself, seemingly more fascinated with Farid al-Atrash’s after-parties than the festival’s purpose.

Multiple reasons might explain why the festival does not feature prominently in accounts of the cinema in 1960s Egypt. Contemporaneous accounts of the festival, like one featured in al-Ahram newspaper, for example, recounted a “coldness” that overtook the event: “The festival days passed without anyone noticing or sensing there was even a festival” (10 March 1960, 6). Perhaps choosing the first days of Ramadan for the festival dates reduced attendance, but there seems to have been a reluctance to support the event from the get-go by industry professionals. Even stars deployed to “greet the guests with bouquets of flowers, did so without the slightest enthusiasm as if reluctantly fulfilling a duty.” (10 March 1960, 6) In her work on the festival, Clara Kossaifi contacted an actress who featured in festival press coverage, but the actress couldn’t even remember attending.

But the lack of enthusiasm seemed to have wider structural roots that may be related to a disconnect between the industry heavyweights and the purported ideological motivations of the conference. Al-Ahram revealed that when a call was issued for producers in Egypt to submit their films for the festival, no one responded (29 Feb 1960, 6). When a second call went out, only three films were submitted. While Henri Barakat’s Dua al-Karawan, released more than 6 months before the festival, was first announced as the Egyptian entry to the festival, it soon became clear that it would not be included in the festival because it was selected as Egypt’s pick for the Oscars. Magda’s Qays wa Layla, which had premiered 6 weeks before the start of the festival, and was a total bust at the box office, seemed to be the final pick.

al-Kawakib, 11 February 1958

This apparent disinterest by the industry raises questions that need far more research. Did the film industry itself derail the event with its disinterest? What was the relationship between the festival organizers and Egypt’s film industry, which was committed to a global distribution system that privileged studio profits, and which held a very traditional understanding of the cinema? How do exhibitors and film programmers, committed to certain ideological positions, work within these hegemonic industry structures underpinned by exploitative economic conditions? The question lingered in the air at the meeting.

Unlike other festivals, the Afro-Asian festival programmed popular films, which scholar Elena Razlogova calls “nonaligned entertainment cinema.” As Razlogova shows, some participants, like the Chinese delegation, criticized the films selected at the Tashkent edition of the festival: “We cannot agree with the ideology of some films” (cited in Razlogova). In the Cairo edition, notwithstanding reports of a lacklustre reception to the festival, audiences reportedly applauded the Indian entry to the festival, the Tamil anti-colonial action colour film Veerapandiya Kattabomman (dir. B. R. Panthulu, 1959). One question that arose during the meeting was about the role of “entertainment cinema” in festivals and programming. Did the Afro-Asian Film festival merely attempt a cultural exchange of cinema productions, not a radical reimagining of the role of cinema? Did critics of the festival misread the realities of the cinema economy and cinema culture at the time?

Certainly, the world film economy was rapidly changing from the late 1950s. New genres of films were circulating, and state-run initiatives such as reciprocal national film weeks (The 1957 Chinese Film Week in Egypt and the reciprocal Egyptian Film Week in China for example) aimed to create avenues for cultural exchange and diplomacy. During the 1960s, tensions and discussions about the role of cinema in the anti-colonial struggle and in particular in the struggle against Israeli aggression, animated cinema critics and galvanised a set of filmmakers around the role of art in the struggle. In terms of distribution, the Arab boycott struck blows at various films and zionist projects with varying success. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of filmmakers and components of the filmworld continued to work towards fulfilling the project of a liberational cinema. In 1974, Rauf Tawfiq’s book The Cinema When It Says No saw hope in the wave of resistance cinema made worldwide during the late 60s and early 70s. He describes film as the most consequential artform, with the highest levels of circulation and influence.

advertisement for Chinese Film Week in al-Ahram, 16 September 1957.

UAR Film Week in China, 1965. al-Musawwar.

Yet, from a commercial and distributional perspective, it was still the star filled, action-packed films, and what in 1968 the Egyptian New Cinema Movement derided as films “expansively decorative, unrealistic, drenched in light that only exists in how we imagine the heroes of A Thousand and One Nights” that still lured in audiences to the cinema. South-South distribution lines, while nurtured in some (often state-run) sectors and despite the allure of Indian films, did not seem to be a priority. This is not surprising. Stars and big studio productions still pulled in audiences, and exhibitors, wary of box-office numbers, knew this. Most of Egypt’s cinema elite in 1960s Egypt were, afterall, industrialists and businesspeople who knew what sold. In my research on 1960s movie-going, most people remembered the cinema as a space to have a good time and relax. When, in the late 1950s, Nasser was asked about his movie preferences, he quipped: “What I like are cowboy pictures and musicals. I do not like dramas and heavy films.”

So, how do we understand the Afro-Asian cinematic flows in this context? How do programmers, then, contend with this? How do programmers and exhibitors define their cinema public? How do programmers and exhibitors attract audiences in Egypt to a film with limited marketing capacity and not subtitled in Arabic, for example, and when there are multiple choices at the same time to attend an Egyptian comedy or an American action film that featured their favorite stars.

In this regard, I wonder if a class analysis needs to be pushed further to the fore in future discussions about programming. How is cinematic taste cultivated, and how does attending a certain cinema or film become a marker of social status? What is the position of exhibitors on questions of class and accessibility of the cinema? Connected to this are the economic realities within which cinemas function today. Going to the cinema has become an expensive luxury for many around the world. Even though ticket prices are relatively low in Egypt, waning or sometimes poor attendance can put pressure on exhibitors to screen blockbusters (often marketed aggressively by their distributors) to encourage more ticket sales. During the meeting, exhibitors admitted having to vary programming to draw in more audiences or to rent their space out to corporations or other organizations as a way of keeping afloat.

Unstable and riddled with contradictions, the political atmosphere that facilitated Afro-Asian initiatives and exchanges fundamentally shifted from the mid-1960s. The Egyptian Syrian Union collapsed, Sukarno was toppled, and the environment within which the Indonesian leftist filmmaker and screenwriter Bachtiar Siagian ran the third and final edition of the festival crumbled in a violent orgy of terror and prosecution as communists were rounded up, imprisoned, and executed. In 1966, Siagian was arrested and spent 12 years in prison. In Egypt, after the 1967 defeat and the death of Nasser in 1970, a reactionary regime came to power and pulled the levers of Egyptian political life to the right. In a few years, Lebanon, which became a refuge for Egyptian filmmakers disenchanted with conditions in Egypt in the previous decade, spiralled into war.

Wider history of South-South distribution

While we can pen odes to the memory of Afro-Asian film solidarity, there were already lines of South-South distribution that preceded and followed the Bandung Conference that can nuance our overall picture of South-South cinematic exchanges. Egyptian films, since the 1920s, were criss-crossing the globe, with popular Egyptian melodramas, comedies, and musicals delighting audiences in Jaffa, Khartoum, Tripoli, and Baghdad. Historians, such as Morgan Corriou, have recently shown how these popular films created a sense of anti-colonial and Pan-Arab solidarity. In Arab countries under French control in particular, authorities expressed worry about Egyptian films’ influence over the populations they controlled. They were horrified when, for example, Syrian audiences erupted into cheers when a character in an Egyptian melodrama (probably Yusuf Wahbi’s Awlad al-Dhawat) shot French characters in the movie. Yet because of their melodramatic and conventional cinematic aesthetics, these films tend to lie outside discussions of south-south exchange.

Around the same time, Latin America, especially Argentina and Brazil, emerged as a large market for Egyptian films. Egyptian films also made a splash in countries like Tanzania, Ghana, and Kenya. As Laura Fair shows in her study of cinema-going in Tanzania, while American films dominated screen time, it was the Egyptian films that many remembered and were particularly fond of. These lines of distribution, while not framed in anti-colonial terms, do speak of south-south exchanges and the untapped area of study for cinema historians. By 1970, outside the Arab world, Egyptian films were being exported to Iran, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Turkey; yet we know little of the dynamics of those imports or the nature of their screenings.

Exhibition within Egypt also presents a more complex view of South-South exchange. As Némésis Srour shows Hindi films first captivated the Egyptian public from the mid-1950s with the screening of the 1952 adventure epic, and colour film, Aan. Between 1965-1969, Indian films accounted for 2.5% of all foreign films exhibited in the country and had a particular grip on people’s imaginations. In my research on cinema-going, one person I interviewed about her movie-going memories in the 1960s still remembered a popular song featured in the 1964 Hindi film Sangam “Ich Liebe Dich, I Love You.” Around this time, Hong Kong martial arts films were drawing in unprecedented numbers of people to the cinemas. By 1973, spooked by the rise in popularity of Indian and Hong Kong Karate films, the Ministry of Culture imposed restrictions on their screenings. In 1974, Karate, Japanese Samurai, and martial arts films were outright banned by ministerial decree.

al-Kawakib, 26 February 1974)

al-Kawakib, 3 May 1955

The meeting also challenged me to think about questions of entertainment and the role of cinema, beyond the ideological. Cinema today plays a very different role than it did in the 1960s. With economic and infrastructural constraints (electricity, the internet, etc.) whole classes of people are pushed out of the cinema. Can we, amidst all this, create alternative regimes of spectatorship and nurture alternative distribution routes? Can we create the conditions to unpick what it means to watch a movie or go to the cinema? In my research, I explore the way cinema exists not just in the realm of the representational, but in the social and the economic spheres, and in the everyday. Cinema, historically, has facilitated solidarities and community building; not just in a ‘big picture’ way; but in the intimate realms of the neighbourhood, the city, or the refugee camp. A few weeks ago, al-Jazeera showed a news report of Camp Cinema in Gaza, a community initiative organized by the filmmaker Yahia Al-Sholi to introduce children to the cinema and ease the pressure of war. One of the films shown was the short animated American film Soar, a touching story of a miniature pilot who falls from the sky. A comment by a child, Malek Baker, interviewed for the news report stood out and serves to remind us what, beyond our meetings and analyses, beyond our programming and curational efforts, what the role of cinema can simply be:

“When I come to the cinema camp, I feel like I forget the war and no longer hear the sound of drones because I am watching movies. I lose myself in it. But once we leave the camp, we remember the war and feel the drones and bombardment again.”

A look back at the history of the Afro-Asian Film Festival at the Global South Programmer’s meeting drew into sharp focus the alternative cinema cultures that percolated during the era of decolonisation and that sowed the seeds of future attempts at creating alternative cinematic publics. Looking back at moments of South-South exchange also revealed the opportunities and the histories of alternative routes of film travel. But this topic also raises fundamental questions, not only of the history of distribution and exhibition, of which much is still to be examined, but about the broader picture of south-south circulation and exchange that do not fit so neatly into certain ideological commitments.

Cinema is many things; a political education project, a leisure activity, or an escape. But, in many commercial settings, it is also a business, and cinemas must find ways to remain open. In this way, discussions about programming are fundamentally tied to economic and political conditions in which cinema culture functions. Understanding these economics and new political configurations (what does South-South mean today? What’s the role of large South media conglomerates?) is an essential component to thinking about film programming and about alternative modes of distribution.

إفضال الساكت المديرة المساعدة (للدراسات العربية والإسلامية ودراسات الشرق الأوسط) في المعهد الهولندي-الفلمنكي بالقاهرة. حصلت على درجة الدكتوراه في التاريخ والدراسات العربية والإسلامية من جامعة سيدني، أستراليا، حيث عكفت على دراسة تاريخ السينما في مصر من عام 1896 إلى 1952. وتواصل عملها على تواريخ السينما في مصر، مع التركيز على الجمهور ونظام النجم والديناميكيات الخفية لإنتاج الأفلام وعرضها. نُشرت أعمالها في المجلة الدولية لدراسات الشرق الأوسط و مجلة الدراسات العربية. وقامت مؤخراً، بالتعاون مع فيليب ميرس (جامعة أنتويرب) ودانيال بيلتريست (جامعة غنت)، بتحرير مجلد "السينما في العالم العربي: تواريخ جديدة، منهجيات جديدة" (منشورات بلومزبري الأكاديمية، 2023). تعمل حاليًا على مشروع كتاب عن السينما في مصر، يحمل عنواناً مؤقتاً هو: "مجنون بالأفلام في مصر: السينما، الإمبراطورية والأمة، 1896-1939" (Movie-Mad in Egypt: Cinema, Empire and Nation, 1896–1939).

Ifdal Elsaket is assistant-director (Arabic and Islamic Studies and Middle East Studies) at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo. Ifdal received her PhD in history and Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Sydney, Australia, where she worked on the history of cinema in Egypt, 1896-1952. She continues to work on histories of the cinema in Egypt, focusing on audiences, the star system, and off-screen dynamics of film production and exhibition. Her work has appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and Arab Studies Journal. She has recently edited (alongside Philippe Meers (UAntwerp) and Daniel Biltereyst (UGent) the volume Cinema in the Arab World: New Histories, New Approaches (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Ifdal is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled: Movie-Mad in Egypt: Cinema, Empire and Nation, 1896–1939.