Al-Karnak Aly Badrakhan (Egypt, 1975)

For our generation -Egyptians born in the 80s- the film Al-Karnak was an urban legend. You would hear stories about the political boldness, or the explicit scenes, but since its limited release in the cinemas in 1975, and for decades to come, the film was banned from being screened on television or displayed on video stores, until only a few years back when a censored version of the film started surfacing on satellite channels, coinciding with a new era of political strategy in Egypt that saw allowing of venting channels as a survival tactic.

The unofficial ban was not the first link between the film and the political leadership. A basic comparison between the screenplay and Naguib Mahfouz’s novella it’s based on reveals some insightful findings; most significant would be the imposition of October 1973 war in the screenplay as the book end scene with the rest of the story told as a long flashback. Seemingly glorifying the then current Saddat regime was the golden way to allow for the political fierce critique of the previous Nasser era.

Neutralizing the political leadership was not the only aim Mamdouh El Leithy (writer/ producer) targeted in his interpretive screenplay; attempting to ensure commercial success led to addition of comedy generating characters to the original story, as well as a trademark fight scene anticipated by fans of actor Farid Shawqy.

Being his first feature film, director Aly Badrakhan swings between delivering the overloaded script and establishing his own style, the notion that led to an inflated two and a half hour film, paced mainly by the vibrant performances of Soad Hosny, Kamal El Shennawy and Nour El Sherif, in addition to surges of exceptional editing and camera work that brought together some iconic scenes like Zainab’s suicide attempt scene.

The film portraits a revolution that went wrong, following Zainab, Esmail and Helmy, university colleagues who believe themselves to be “the sons of the revolution” and attempt to act as such. Their genuine activism triggers the frantic secret police unit, leading to rounds of groundless detention where they are exposed to physically and psychologically torture that ultimately led to the death of Helmy.

Rereading Mahfouz’s Al-Karnak in the nowadays Egyptian context reveals a timeless relevance to it; Mahfouz - in his classical exercise - turns a current sociopolitical event into a pool for denser metaphors of generational interaction and human struggle that transcendent the locality of time and place. In comparison, the film version of Al-Karnak succeeds in being the first Egyptian political film to exposes the brutality of the Nasserite police state so bluntly, but in the process missed core values of the book.

By Mohamed Beshir