Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
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Somewhere between dystopian and historical fiction, reality and the imaginary, dreaming and waking, sits East of Noon (2024), the second feature film by the Egyptian visual artist and filmmaker Hala Elkoussy. Ostensibly a film about the spirited rebellion of youth in the face of an authoritarian regime, its narrative abstraction makes it a beguiling prospect; this work, set “outside of time,” to use Elkoussy’s own words, floats in an undefined space, both temporally and geographically, yet the world it portrays is so richly detailed and specific. This contrast makes for a fascinating tension in the film—the question “Where are we?” soon gives way to “Where are we going?”
In a community in the middle of nowhere, hemmed in by a guarded chain-link fence, Abdo (Omar Rozek) lives with his grandmother Galala (Menha Batraoui), a wise chronicler and keeper of stories for her people. While the elder maintains these fables as documents of history, she’s also aware of the ways in which the community’s autocrat, a farcical theater performer called Shawky the Showman (Ahmed Kamal), has co-opted them and turned them into tools of oppression. These myths and legends are designed to keep Abdo and his generation in a state of somnambulance. The black-and-white 16mm film is occasionally interrupted by 35mm color sequences, reflecting the dichotomy between Shawky’s imposed dream state and the outside world Abdo seeks but has never seen. His perception of what he might find is therefore also a product of his imagination, but Elkoussy uses this as a way to reclaim the act of storytelling. There should be stories, she seems to say, but Abdo’s generation should tell them.
With Galala, Abdo, and Shawky—especially in the theatrical staging of the latter’s rule—Elkoussy creates mythic archetypes for the purpose of reappropriating and critiquing the folkloric mode. As well as being a convincing narrative device, it’s a tool that allows for a striking visual palette; Galala’s home is gorgeously stuffed with trinkets and antiques, and the props used for Shawky’s shows are just as beautifully rustic. Yet this romantic nostalgia and hollow symbolism is precisely what is failing these people. Other motifs, like the sugar cubes Shawky uses as a method of payment or the sea that Galala so often speaks of, are also in keeping with the whimsy of this imagined world and the dark truths beneath it.
Elkoussy returns to the themes she has explored for much of her career, foregrounding the power of youth and their claim to the future. Hers is a layered and reflexive film with many references to Egypt’s history and political struggles, but it also looks further afield to examine Western attitudes, anticipating how it will be consumed outside of its native context. After the film’s premiere in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight, I spoke with Elkoussy about crafting this fable, turning folklore on its head, and the extensive symbolism of her work.
East of Noon (Hala Elkoussy, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: How has your previous work in the visual arts informed your filmmaking?
HALA ELKOUSSY: After my first feature [Cactus Flower, 2017], it was very clear that I wanted to go on and make more films. I come from the world of visual arts, and I’ve exhibited very well and been in good collections, but there was always this yearning I had to find a bigger audience, especially in the Arab world, where our production is very limited. So when I made my first feature, I realized there was an audience for me and this audience could grow, but then I felt constrained by the fact that it was not a good moment politically and economically. I did not want to make a small, little film, so I had to be creative about how to say something that was meaningful to me, but also that was meaningful to people.
I was inspired by contemporary literature, some dystopian novels, and the idea of setting a story outside of time. I started out thinking that way, but then I realized that what I was writing was not the future. I'm not interested in projecting in that way, but more reflecting. So I ended up describing the film as a dystopia but not in the future. The origin was this desire to be free, to make something that is pertinent, and then I started posing personal questions about what fear does to people, what fear does to an artist. What can art offer to this world—and I mean the larger world, not necessarily just Egypt? And can an artist say that she’s not as culpable as other people? When I was writing the character of Galala, in the beginning, she was all good. Then I somehow thought that that cannot be true. There is a line in the film where she says, “There are no angels in hell.” And this is, I think, the realization that I had as I developed the script, that no one in the film is free of being responsible for something.
NOTEBOOK: Can you talk a little about the relationship between the black-and-white scenes and the striking moments of color footage in the film? Why did you want to shoot on film?
ELKOUSSY: It’s shot on 16mm for the black-and-white scenes and 35mm for the color scenes. It was very important because I wanted the viewer from very early on to stop posing questions about when and where it is. Film would help not just now but even in the long life of the film because it puts you already in this framework that this is not depicting reality, but also distances you from how we make things now. I've always played with this notion of this lack of clear divide between reality and fiction, but also [between] desire and fear. I've tried this in almost everything that I've made so far. But maybe this time it's the boldest transition between one and the other, through this dream machine.
East of Noon (Hala Elkoussy, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: In the film, the folkloric tradition is used to tell the story while, at the same time, this mode is critiqued as a force of oppression. How did you begin to build this idea and such a rich world?
ELKOUSSY: I've always been interested in storytelling and stories as a means to convey meaning. This is what I have been working with for more than twenty years now, this idea that through telling a very small story you could relay ideas in a non-authoritative manner, and always playing against the authority that a cultural product of any kind has on people, especially when I'm making art or a film about Egypt and it is being consumed outside of the country. I tried to reverse this desire to confirm and reaffirm preconceptions. This is something I became very aware of very early on in my career, from my first show in Istanbul. I was presenting a docufiction, and it was very clear that it was fictional, but people still wanted to consume it as reality, because this reduction is very comforting. So from then, I've always played with theatrical elements, curtains and lights, to say that this is a story inside the story, but also to emphasize the theater as a place of artifice.
But when I started thinking about the character of this tyrant, it became clear to me that any tyrant must think that he's doing good, that he has the best interests of the people in mind. No one goes around in life thinking they were evil, even that space of thinking that “I've not been good” means that you are good, because you are actually conscious of it. The first tyrant that I was looking at was [António de Oliveira] Salazar, who I was drawn to from the paintings of Paula Rego. Those paintings were very inspirational to the film, and when you look at them, from the period where she's dealing with the dictatorship, they become almost a joke. When you start looking into the actions of tyrants, of course not including the horror, they have a kind of comical aspect, or you realize that they’re actually just pathetic.
The gamut of symbols and objects that are in the film is almost like a huge reservoir of references that I've been interested in. When I use things that are locally present, that does not mean that people from Egypt will read it a certain way because I like to subvert the meaning of the objects that are used, or to bring them to the present. Sometimes they're completely forgotten, like, for example, the final scene of the film where people are in the water—it’s inspired by the story of Job, and it’s a ritual that's almost extinct now from the eastern Mediterranean. On the Wednesday before Easter, people go to the sea and wash and pray for relief, the same way that Job did. I say that it is almost extinct because it used to happen on the eastern coast of Egypt, which is now kind of a no-go zone because of the situation in Palestine, but also in Syria and Lebanon. So I somehow fell on some old videos of this on YouTube, and I was just fascinated by this collective moving together, trying to find something. Then the sugar cubes: in poor countries, sugar is a way to get energy, so if you cannot have a meal, you drink your tea with a lot of sugar. When we have a sugar shortage, it's almost like a national problem because it can escalate into something else. In the film, it’s this notion that [Shawky] has control over the drug of the poor.
East of Noon (Hala Elkoussy, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: What you’re saying about these notions of a collective is interesting because of the way the film foregrounds a youth rebellion movement and collective action in the fight against an oppressor.
ELKOUSSY: This is another recurring theme for me because I was dealing with this in my first feature, and a short film from 2010 [Mount of Forgetfulness]. So even prior to the [2011] Egyptian Revolution—ever since I had a child, actually—did I gain a new perspective, and that's the perspective of rediscovering the world through innocence. Everything that I took for granted until then started to have a different meaning, or a different flavor, just because I was a witness to young eyes seeing these things.
During the revolution, during that brilliant period of our lives, I met all these young people, and all these barriers between generations, but also social barriers, blurred. As a result, I became closer to much younger people that I would not have normally met in my regular course of life. I empathized but also was a bit envious of this clarity that the youth have about what is important and what is not and what we need to push forward and whatnot. This kind of freedom from considerations and concerns, but also the purity of the ideas, was very contagious and very inspiring. But then things did not turn out in a good direction, and therefore it felt like in my first feature, and in this one, I'm kind of putting them in the place that they deserve to be. Because for a while, they were demonized as the ones responsible for all this instability—which is ridiculous, but it's still happening now. So, in my own small way, I'm saying they own the future, just like it says in the film, and they deserve to be part of the making of their own future.
One journalist asked me if this is about Egypt’s political situation. So I said this is a very Eurocentric point of view, that when you start thinking that way, you try to distance the film from yourself. I'm kind of amazed that no one saw that this could also be about the relationship that Europe has to the rest of the world. Trying to get the cast to come to Cannes, even, was a moment of realization that we were living this film, because it took me one month of constant nagging. We were granted the visas one day before we were due to leave. When Abdo says, “I want to go out to just see what is there,” he doesn't even have a notion of what that is. For some of the actors, it's their first time in Europe, and for many youth in Egypt, traveling has become impossible. But this place stays alive, somehow, in their imagination, as something that they would like to know or see. In the ’70s, my brother used to get summer jobs in France collecting grapes every year. It doesn't exist anymore, this feeling that you could exist in a world in which you can circulate.
NOTEBOOK: There’s something very special about the fact that the elder, Galala, this storyteller and keeper of all the histories of this community, does change her mind and supports the youth in their aims.
ELKOUSSY: When I wrote this part, where she actually comes to this realization, I always took it in the same direction where I felt sorry for Galala and I was very emotional about it. But what I love about what Menha [Batraoui] brought to the character is this lack of apology. There is this realization: “Yes it’s all true, but I'm not apologetic because I could not have done otherwise.” I really loved that it was like, “Please don’t feel sorry for me.”
There is also this reference to treasure in the film, and it's this notion that in countries with very long histories like Egypt, or Greece and Italy, you're surrounded by this very undefined sense of pride. We spend the first six years of school doing just pharaonic history, because there's so much of it, and it's almost, again, another source of pulling you down. It does not take very long to realize that the remnants of this social pride are impossible to connect. It's almost like they were other people. But it's, again, another one of those drugs. You walk around in the world thinking that “I'm so proud because these are my ancestors.” I feel that it's somehow used in order to dampen the present, but at the same time, it is important, and it needs to be there in a different way. In the final scene of the film, there is a statue of Osiris in the water. He was killed, and then his body was scattered in the water, and it was the woman, Isis, who went and collected his parts. This notion of collecting the parts to make something out of is right there in the end.
