Making Film in Egypt

How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry

Chihab El Khachab

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781649030436
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An ethnographic study of the Egyptian film industry The enormous influence of the Egyptian film industry on popular culture and collective imagination across the Arab world is widely acknowledged, but little is known about its concrete workings behind the scenes. Making Film in Egypt provides a fascinating glimpse into the lived reality of commercial film production in today's Cairo, with an emphasis on labor hierarchies, production practices, and the recent transition to digital technologies. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation among production workers, on-set technicians, and artistic crew members, Chihab El Khachab sets out to answer a simple question: how do filmmakers deal with the unpredictable future of their films? The answer unfolds through a journey across the industry's political economy, its labor processes, its technological infrastructure, its logistical and artistic work, and its imagined audiences. The result is a complex and nuanced portrait of the Arab world's largest film industry, rich in ethnographic detail and theoretical innovations in media anthropology, media studies, and Middle East anthropology.

1

Industry

Setting aside early experiments in film production, the emergence of an Egyptian film industry is traditionally dated to the mid-1930s (Darwish, 1998; Shafik, 2001: 38–40). This coincides with the establishment of Studio Misr, which opened its doors in 1935 under the auspices of nationalist tycoon Talaat Harb. Many more political and economic factors are behind this emergence, however, including the relative freedom allowed to Arabic-speaking filmmakers under British colonial rule, the close intertwinement between cinema and nationalist expression, the influx of theater actors and directors into film production, and the growing construction of exhibition spaces in Egypt (Shafik, 1998: 12–14). This construction reached an all-time high in the late 1950s, with over four hundred cinemas built up to that point (Flibbert, 2001: 112).

Studio Misr was initially a production company, yet it quickly became central to the whole industry because it owned its own filmmaking infrastructure. This included shooting studios and a complete postproduction facility, with all the necessary equipment to edit, mix, and print movies. Soon after its founding, the Studio became a focal point for commercial film production, even as Egypt’s average output reached forty-eight films per year from 1945 to 1952 (Shafik, 1998: 12). As Armbrust indicates (2004: 84), Studio Misr’s contribution to the industry did not lie so much in financing film projects as it did in leasing shooting studios and, crucially, postproduction equipment to smaller production companies. The Studio’s importance was (and remains) infrastructural in this sense. Moreover, as will become apparent, “the 1930s and 1940s were important because it was at this time that the basic economic patterns of Egyptian film production were set. Except for the 1960s, when the cinema was nationalized, variations on these economic patterns persist” (Armbrust, 2004: 83).

From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime gradually took over most private production, distribution, and exhibition companies, while seizing all studios and laboratories. These moves were paralleled by the creation of two key institutions devoted to developing the newly nationalized industry. In 1957, a national film organization was created to promote the industry domestically and internationally. Although it underwent several changes in structure and mandate in its early days, this organization was consolidated as the General Film Organization (GFO) in 1963 (Shafik, 2001: 28). The GFO’s mission was, broadly, to “promote” national film products, but it quickly became a source of direct funding for film production (Telmissany, 1995: 70). Thus, production throughout the 1960s was concentrated in the “public sector” (al-qita‘ al-‘am), even though some private companies were operating (with notorious difficulty) during this period (Flibbert, 2001: 115).

A second key institution was established in 1959: the High Cinema Institute (al-ma‘had al-‘ali li-l-sinima). It remains a prime training ground for screenwriters, directors, cinematographers, art directors, graphic designers, editors, and sound engineers.¹ It is a central networking institution in today’s industry, where successive generations of filmmakers make contacts that will later become useful when they work and employ their ma‘had friends.

Nationalization was not an exceptional event, as several economic sectors were nationalized under Nasser, including textiles, mining, banks, and, most famously, the Suez Canal Company. In film production, as in other sectors, the overall effects of nationalization were twofold. On the one hand, national economic interests were divorced from colonial ones, leading to the development of an autonomous national economy under centralized state control. On the other hand, central control led to an increasing reliance on a bureaucracy that became too burdened—and too burdensome—to allow economic expansion, especially in the wake of Egypt’s defeat by Israel in 1967 (Khouri, 2010: 54–57). Today, the state retains only limited control over film funding and distribution—a major issue in the 1960s, when filmmakers were bound to deal with the state bureaucracy to finance and distribute their products.

After Nasser’s death in 1970, President Anwar Sadat promoted a general program of economic liberalization conventionally known as the “opening” (infitah). State funding for film production dropped sharply.² All of production, distribution, and exhibition were once more privatized, and the Cinema Industry Chamber (ghurfat sina‘at al-sinima) was reestablished.³ Yet, as Flibbert observes, “the film industry in the Sadat era remained mired in a morass of state regulation and oversight” (2001: 123), a statement that may be extended to today’s industry. Major studio facilities such as Studio Nahhas and the EMPC remain under state control. Egyptian filmmakers must interact with state bureaucracy to clear the censorship process, to get ticket sales approved by the tax authorities, and to secure shooting permits (see El Khachab, 2017). As Flibbert mentions, “state tax policy treated the industry more like a source of revenue than anything else. According to one observer [Samir Farid, a prominent film critic], tax collectors were sent to cinemas every single day of the week to collect the state’s share of receipts, including on weekends” (2001: 124). Such stories of tax burden are common in the industry to this day.

All in all, one can distinguish four critical periods in the Egyptian film industry’s history. From the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, the industry was consolidated during what is known as its “Golden Age.” From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the industry was nationalized under Nasser, and various state institutions emerged to promote national production/distribution. From the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, film production was once more liberalized as part of Egypt’s “opening.” From the early 2000s until today, the industry is witnessing significant changes in its financing patterns as well as a wider transition to digital cinema technologies.

Into the New Millennium

The industry underwent two major changes in the early 2000s. The first was spawned by a specific event, according to many of my interlocutors: the wildly popular release of Isma‘iliya rayih gayy (Return Ticket to Ismailia, 1997). The film, a youth-oriented comedy starring emerging comedian Mohammed Heneidy, reaped unprecedented gains in domestic theaters and across the Arab world. This is said to have driven the industry into an era of prosperity on the back of light comedies and a new generation of movie stars: Ahmad Helmy, Ahmad el-Saka, Mona Zaki, and Mohammed Saad, to name some of those who are still active today. This regained prosperity contrasts with the drought of the 1990s, when production outputs fell to historical lows.⁴ The 2000s witnessed a short-lived boom in commercial film production in comparison, but I doubt that it was caused by a sudden shift in audience taste toward comedy and younger stars. What coincided with increasing profit making were the larger investments made in the form of distribution loans by major satellite television channels in the Gulf, including ART and Rotana.

Distribution loans were instrumental in financing film production throughout the 2000s.⁵ This model of production is sometimes called “brokerage” (samsara), and the producer dismissively dubbed a “broker” (simsar). The label evokes the small-scale brokering agents on Cairo’s property market, who extract gains from transactions between private buyers and sellers without generating any wealth of their own. A simsar producer makes movies with the distributor’s money. This is a problem, according to the well-known cinematographer Marwan Saber, because the producer has no incentive to make a “high-quality” product, as “he already made his money before the movie is done.”⁶ According to several interlocutors, “brokerage” production culminated in the rise of the film company Good News, which was eventually dissolved in the late 2000s. Good News is credited with having increased all wages in the industry by a great margin, most notably among stars,⁷ and it has been at the center of regular money laundering accusations.⁸

Satellite channels largely stopped giving out loans by 2010—an event whose explanation remains mysterious, according to most of my interlocutors. As independent director Hala Galal asserted, it seemed like production was halted “because the sheikh has changed his mind,” alluding to the common stereotype according to which Gulf-based investors (or “sheikhs”) can shift colossal sums of money on a whim. The producer Sherif Mandour, on his part, explained this event as an aftershock of the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In his view, the crisis affected global advertising businesses in such a way that advertising revenues significantly dropped in Gulf-based satellite channels, thereby limiting their investments in film production in Egypt.

Since the early 2010s, film financing in Egypt has become a matter of individual investments. While I was conducting my fieldwork, the two most active financiers were Walid el-Kurdi in New Century and Ahmad and Mohamed El Sobky in their respective companies. These producers make movies out of pocket and shoulder all the risk in distribution. Major producers of the 2000s like Al-Arabia, Oscar, Al-Nasr, or Al-Masa were unwilling to do this without distribution loans. Other companies have resorted to a strategy of local co-production,⁹ where resources are pooled on discrete projects among several producers.¹⁰ A well-known co-producer is Mohammed Hefzi, head of Film Clinic, who admits to never going beyond 50 percent equity in investing on a single project. This contrasted with New Century’s or Sobky’s financing strategy in those years, or with “independent” financing strategies that relied strictly on international film festival funds and meager state resources.

The second major change in the postmillennial industry is technological. The advent of digital filmmaking has made analog shooting and postproduction technologies obsolete, including analog cameras, negative rolls, Moviola editing suites, as well as coloring and negative labs. This change is often narrated as an “inevitable” and “natural” development, according to a deterministic narrative of technological change equally prevalent in Euro-American societies (see Pfaffenberger, 1992). As one might expect, however, the actual passage to digital technologies was far from automatic. The earliest digital cinema technologies were nonlinear editing suites such as Lightworks and Avid, which arrived in Egypt in the early 1990s. According to the prominent editor Mona Rabie, the first digitally edited film was Youssef Chahine’s al-Muhagir (The Emigré, 1994), but digital editing suites were more rapidly adopted in the television and advertising sectors. This early connection between digital editing and television/advertising explains why major postproduction companies today work with clients in all media sectors.

While nonlinear editing suites were well established by the early 2000s, color grading and mixing still relied on analog methods, which meant that derelict studios maintained an important role in postproduction. Since the late 1950s, the postproduction infrastructure had been under state control, most notably in Studio Misr (which was reprivatized in the early 2000s) and the EMPC (which was built in the mid-1990s under President Hosni Mubarak’s auspices). These two sites were the only places where one could edit, color, and mix a film in Egypt until the advent of digital postproduction.¹¹ Such technologies were initially imported in the late 2000s by today’s biggest private postproduction studios: Aroma and TimeCode. Digital color grading technologies (DaVinci, Luster, Base Light) and digital sound technologies (Pro Tools) made local postproduction affordable and comparable in quality to non-Egyptian facilities. As the mixer Mohammed Fawzi recalls, the costs of local postproduction between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s were equivalent to the costs of better-maintained facilities outside Egypt, where some larger Egyptian companies would finish their films.

While digital postproduction tools were becoming more and more popular, the Egyptian media industry continued to use analog cameras until the late 2000s. By the early 2010s, however, digital cameras had become the norm. The workflow between shooting and postproduction all the way to printing was digitized.¹² Since digital cinema cameras produced digital material, it became possible simply to transfer the film’s files from a camera to backup hard drives to computers equipped with postproduction software, until a final film file was exported, printed, and projected. This shift has not had a significant impact on the industry’s ownership structure: large sums of capital and access to distribution deals are still concentrated in the same hands. The narrative according to which digital technologies “democratize” access to media production has therefore not materialized outside the industry’s margins. To add another caveat, one should not assume that this digitization process led to a “dematerialization” of filmmaking, pace editors who worked with greasy negatives on Moviola machines. Filmmaking was just “rematerialized,” with a renewed significance attached to computers and hard drives as opposed to negatives and chemical solutions (see Chapter 3).

With significant changes in capital and technology, the contemporary film industry could be described as a collection of small- to medium-sized companies working with different sources of funding (private capital, local coproduction, festival/state funding), contracting their own cast and crew, renting equipment, securing shooting locations, and seeking postproduction services to make and sell movies on a project-by-project basis.¹³ The myriad companies in today’s industry are mostly inactive: some exist in name only while others produce one movie without being able to survive beyond it. In the most recent Euromed Audiovisual report, a survey of 378 commercial films found that almost 75 percent of all films between 2002 and 2012 were produced by only twenty companies (2013: 52). This pattern may be attributed to a variety of factors, not least of which is the chronic unavailability of capital. Since 2013, several major productions—including Marwan Hamed’s al-Fil al-azraq (The Blue Elephant, 2014) and Sherif Arafa’s al-Gazira 2 (The Island 2, 2014)—have been halted for months at a time because producers were unwilling to invest more in them. I would argue that one of the main reasons behind this unavailability of capital is the tight local/regional distribution and exhibition market.

The distinction between production, distribution, and exhibition is formally recognized in Egypt, but these phases are consolidated within a few companies bound by a de facto oligopoly over domestic exhibition, whose current shape can be traced to the early 2000s. Over this period, the two largest theater-owning groups have been Renaissance (the distribution arm of Al-Arabia, which is headed by Isaad Younis) and the trio composed by Al-Nasr (headed by the late Mohammed Hassan Ramzy), Oscar (headed by Wael Abdallah), and Al-Masa (headed by Hesham Abdel-Khalek). Smaller exhibitors include Dollar Film (a holding of Walid el-Kurdi, head of New Century Film Production), Misr International Films (headed by Gaby Khoury), and the United Brothers (headed by Farouk and Walid Sabry). Until the late 2000s, the major producers were the major distributors/exhibitors. This market set unattainable standards for smaller production companies—most notably, the demand to hire major movie stars. For bigger companies, however, the oligopoly guaranteed that box-office revenue could be integrally recovered without dividing shares between a distributor and an exhibitor.

In addition to domestic exhibition, television sales have been a standard source of revenue in the industry since the establishment of terrestrial television in 1960 (Amin, 1996: 102). The Egyptian film industry quickly gained popularity across the Arab world by producing the very rare Arabic-language film content on national television channels in the region. The regional predominance of Egyptian films can be attributed to the absence of any significant competition, although political conflicts with neighboring nations, as well as increasing imports of Hollywood productions, had severely constrained the market share of Egyptian movies in the Arab world by the 1970s (Flibbert, 2001: 77–78). From the 1990s to this day, however, serial drama production sponsored by large satellite channels in the Gulf has financially dwarfed the national film and television sector.¹⁴ Although these Gulf-based channels stopped sponsoring the film industry via distribution loans by the early 2010s, they remain the main buyers of Egyptian media products outside the country.

Overall, it is difficult to secure accurate figures on the revenue generated by commercial films in Egypt. Big production companies have the most accurate numbers on domestic ticket sales, because they hire a representative (mandub) traveling with each film copy to report back on theater revenues. Since financial transactions are largely cash-based, there remains some degree of doubt in the records ke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the Text
• Introduction
• 1. Industry
• 2. Process
• 3. Reserves
• 4. Coordination
• 5. Visualization
• 6. Enchantment
• Retrospective
• Appendix 1: Division of Labor
• Appendix 2: Operational Sequence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index