Program Notes: IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY

IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY screened on September 20, 2018 as a part of our Children of Abraham/Ibrahim series.

At once an ode and a requiem for Cairo, In the Last Days of the City, Tamer El-Said’s heartbreaking debut feature, is a master-class in capturing time and space. Though the Egyptian capital takes center stage here, this melancholic poem speaks to the magic and violence of the Arab metropolis at large, with Beirut and Baghdad also making an appearance, the former literally and the latter spiritually.

Khalid Abdalla’s disillusioned flaneur anchors the film in the soul-crushing years preceding the Arab Spring, but the greater power here lies in Said’s somber retrospection on the last decade. Though the vast majority of the film was shot before 2011, and took about eight years to finish, one gets the feeling it could not have been made without the numbing desperation that has overtaken the country following 2013. The film thrives in expressing the inexpressible, fixating on scenes of violence and chaos with the same reverence and attention it gives those of romance and friendship. In this way, Said faithfully captures the fever of and paradox of being a Cairene in the 21st century. His pseudo-documentary style is disheartening and alarming at times, but it also succeeds at capturing the nuance of Downtown Cairo’s aesthetic, at once one of decadence and decay.

The line between fiction and reality is further blurred by our protagonist, who simply goes by the first name of his actor, Khaled. Besides the name, film Khaled also shares the actor’s disjointed sense of belonging, with dizziness that accompanies those who have one foot inside their home and the other far away. Through character and visual motifs, Said places the film and its characters squarely in conversation with much of contemporary Egyptian independent cinema, particularly that of Ahmed Abdalla. While in no way derivative of Abdalla’s work, In the Last Days of the City shares delightful similarities with the themes of his filmography, and especially with Heliopolis (2009), Microphone (2010), and Rags and Tatters (2013). Heliopolis, in which Said actually had a cameo, similarly follows a filmmaker who does not know what he’s trying to capture, but knows he simply must film. Though Heliopolis focuses on the eponymous Cairo district, while Last Days focuses primarily on the downtown center, both share a potent sense of spatial tragedy as well as a desire to investigate and resist nostalgia, despite the temptation to indulge in its comforts. Less concerned with the past, Microphone echoes the need to capture the fleeting present, doubling down on the notion of filmmaking as archiving that is so prevalent in both the text and metatext of Last Days. Though radically different in its subject matter and use (or lack thereof) of dialogue, Rags and Tatters mirrors Last Days’ dissolution of reality through its obsession with the mundane. In their fascination with forgotten urban spaces and corners, both films seek to excavate the Cairo that is all but ignored by mainstream cinema and television, and in the process challenge our limited notions of what the city is or can be.

Many were at first shocked when Last Days was covertly ‘banned’ from being screened in Egypt, given it does not explicitly attack the government, but anyone who watches closely will see that it does so much more. By inviting us to such an alienated and contradictory exploration of Cairo, Said pushes his audience to soak in the discomfort of the present. And that’s bound to get folks riled up.

  • Contributed by Hazem Fahmy, University of Texas at Austin

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