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Copts react angrily to `racy' new drama

REUTERS, Cairo
Monday, Aug 02, 2004, Page 16

When Egyptian film director Osama Fawzi tackled the minority Coptic Christian community of his birth in a major feature film, he must have known he could not please everyone, least of all the Copts.

So rarely has Egyptian cinema put Coptic characters in leading roles that Adly and Nimat, a man and wife living in 1960s Cairo in the period piece I Love the Cinema, have come to bear the burden of representing all Coptic Christians down the ages.

Egypt's Copts, the remains of a community which predates the Arab invasion in the 7th century, make up between five and 10 percent of the 70 million Egyptians. Their social customs are hardly distinguishable from those of their Muslim neighbors.

But the behavior of the Coptic characters in I Love the Cinema has caused outrage and dismay in the community.

Adly is too fanatical, Nimat appears too lascivious, the couple next door should not have been kissing and Copts should not have been fighting in church, Copts have complained.

To make matters worse in Christian eyes, Fawzi converted to Islam on marriage and the main actors are Muslim too.

"We are all sad ... at the way the director portrayed Christians very negatively. Perhaps it is because the director is a convert," said Gamal Rushdi, a 54-year-old Copt who was so inquisitive about the film he took his children and relatives to see it.

A group of 40 prominent Copts, including some clerics, has made a formal complaint to the public prosecutor demanding that the film be withdrawn on account of 15 scenes that "degrade the image of Christianity."

They particularly objected to the depiction of Adly's obsessive puritanism and the few love scenes, modest by international standards but enough to earn the film the Egyptian equivalent of an X rating -- no one under 18 admitted.

"Since when were Christians as fanatical as those presented in the movie, or is this the beginning [of a trend] to associate Copts with fanaticism and put this idea in more movies?" asked Aziz Morqous Khalil, supervisor of the Hanging Church in Egypt.

Directors should criticize extreme religiosity in Muslim families too and Fawzi should not have chosen such a family to represent the Copts of Egypt, he said.

"The wife's mother, for instance, is very sharp-tongued, the grandmother is a thief and the sister is morally loose and even the husband practices the Biblical rules without understanding them," Khalil said.

Outside Cairo's main cathedral in early July, some 100 Copts demanded the film be banned and the crew tried for contempt of religion.

NAKED IN BUBBLE BATH

Sally Girgis, a Christian cinema-goer, said she was shocked by the sex scenes in the film and felt uncomfortable watching them with her family.

In one scene Nimat, played by the voluptuous Leila Elwi, lounges in a bubble bath in front of her young son Naim. In another Nimat mounts Adly on the sofa, trying to persuade him to make love during one of his bouts of fasting and abstinence.

Girgis said the censors should have known that Copts are as opposed to obscenity as Muslims.

Rami Adel, another Christian cinema-goer, said he liked the film but felt some scenes should have been cut.

"I think that the censors did not censor these scenes because the movie is about Copts and we are a minority in Egypt," said Adel. "If the movie was about Muslims it would have been banned immediately."

In all the furor about sex and the representation of Copts, commentators have tended to overlook a central theme of the film -- how Naim helps his father and mother rediscover harmony in their lives and finally fulfils his desire to go to the cinema, which his father had long forbidden because of his fanaticism.

Adly and Nimat make love in a beach hut at the Mediterranean resort of Ras el-Barr, Adly jokes about the sexual antics of his newly married sister-in-law and, liberated, puts Naim on the crossbar of a bicycle as they ride along the sands.

Veteran film critic Tareq Al Shinnawi said demands to ban the film showed Egypt had not shaken off extremism.

"Unfortunately we lack the flexibility to deal with movies about Islam or Christianity-related issues," Shinnawi said.

Christians are rarely portrayed in Egyptian cinema and, when they are, directors have preferred to present them idealistically, he said.

"This over repeated ideal picture of Christians on the screen made Christians believe that they should be always portrayed that way," he said.
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