After the massacre of the Mansoura girl.. Did Egyptian cinema encourage violence against women? art

Cairo- The incident of beheading a girl from Mansoura University by the hands of a young man who did not want to associate with him caused numerous reactions on social networks, and some accused Egyptian cinema of encouraging these incidents by showing numerous scenes of violence against women.

The reality has become crueler and more terrible than the Egyptian filmmakers imagined. Even the scenes of harassment, assault and rape did not end with the scene of the murder of a woman in front of a large number of people. Of course, none of the screenwriters’ imagination reached the point of slaughtering a girl in her early twenties in front of her colleagues at the entrance to the college.

A number of more serious films dealt with women’s issues, starting with the film “Marriage” (1933), which depicted the issue of forced marriage, because a girl is forced to marry someone she does not love, and the matter was repeated in the films “Something of Fear”. (1969) and “The Second Wife” (1969). 1967), these are the films that finally triumphed for women, and the immortal final scene came in “Something of Fear” expressing the revolution of the masses, in protest against “Atris’s marriage to Fouad”, even if it involved political projections.

Violence against women in the comedies of the fifties and sixties was not a major crisis for women. Fershdi Abaza greets Shadia in “The 13th Wife” (1962). Shadia later claims her husband by slapping him back.

“it’s a mess”

The love story of a violent, psychopathic maniac portrayed by director Youssef Chahine in his latest film “Heya Fawda” (2007), with the participation of director Khaled Youssef and a screenplay by Nasser Abdel Rahman. In it, we see how intense love and rejection by a lover can turn into destructive violence and rape in the context of a story about police repression and corruption that hit her a few years before the January 2011 revolution.

“If it works, I’ll kill you so I can live, I’ll kill you…” says corrupt police secretary Hatem (Khaled Saleh) as he attacks girlfriend Nour (Mena Shalaby) – whom he loves obsessively but who rejects him – after he kidnapped her and took her to a secluded place, to rape her while he imagined in his mind that she became his wife and bore him a son. Nour fiercely resists him and punches him, so he beats her until she loses consciousness, and he stands in front of her lifeless body crying with passion.

The film ends with the revolution of the people of the region against Hatem and his oppression, and Hatem shoots the prosecutor and fiancé of his “beloved” Sherif (Youssef El-Sharif), then Hatem commits suicide by shooting himself, so this is the end of injustice.

Tell me, Scheherazade.

The film “Tell Me Shahrazad” is considered the most direct film of the millennium in dealing with the problems of violence against women, and it is represented by Yousry Nasrallah as director and Waheed Hamed as author. Heba Younis (Mona Zaki), a famous TV presenter, faces pressure from her husband, an alpinist. journalist Karim (Hassan Al-Raddad), to stop drinking alcohol. Political topics in his program, in order to realize his professional aspirations in the editor-in-chief’s chair.

In her program, Heba turns away from politics to present humane women’s stories that reveal the oppression and injustice women face, in harsh conditions and well-established social traditions, which angers her husband and beats her severely.

Heba comes out in the final scene, facing the audience of her TV show, with marks on her face from the beatings she received from her husband, and she smiles at the camera to start telling her personal story this time, saying: “I am a beaten and oppressed guest .” Women’s oppression lasted in all social classes, until it reached the television company that presented their story.

Critic Tariq Al-Shennawy comments – in his article in the magazine Rose Al-Youssef – that the film’s script is based on the transition from one story to another, but unites the resistance to injustice and the victory of women, such as the character represented by the artist Sawsan Badr, who deals with the issue marriage in Eastern society, and who lived as a virgin because she was not She only wants to achieve equality in the relationship with men within the framework of legal marriage.

The World of Waheed Hamid

In his films, author Waheed Hamed connected women’s honor with society’s vision of her and her revolution against society, its values ​​and traditions. In the film “A File of Etiquette” (1986), Madiha (Madiha Kamel), a girl who works in a simple profession, she suddenly finds herself unjustly accused in a moral case that offends her with two friends, as for Ghada, the secretary of a businessman (Yousra) in “The Mansi” (1993), she refuses her boss’s order to give her body to an influential man , and seeks the help of the train transfer worker Youssef Al-Mansi (Adel Imam) to save her and preserve her honor, while the dancer Sonia Selim (Nabila Obaid) fights a fierce battle against influential people, because they refuse to give her permission to establish an orphanage in the film “The Dancer and the Politician” (1990) about the story of Ihsan Abdel Quddous.

“Sorry, law.”

While the Egyptian director Enas El-Degheidy started a controversy with her first film “Sorry, the Law” (1985), based on the screenplay by Ibrahim Al-Mogy, which deals with injustice in the application of the law, the inequality of men and women, how the law differentiates the treatment of men and to women when they are in the same situation, by bringing the husband to the misdemeanor court and the wife to the criminal court, a mild punishment for the husband who kills an unfaithful wife, while a severe punishment applies to a woman who takes the same position with her husband.

And in “Cheap Meat” (1995), based on the screenplay by Salah Fouad, Al-Degheidy deals with the issue of the sale of underage village girls to older and adventurous non-Egyptian pleasure students through various models, and caused great controversy after it was shown in cinemas.

Critic Abd al-Ghani Daoud believes – in his book “Egyptian film directors” – that “Al-Degheidy in his films presents women as a negative being, as a body that arouses desire, within the framework of a rich class steeped in wealth, separated from its real society and far from our fundamental and root problems, but it remains (sorry, The Law) is an exceptional, most important and outstanding film among her other films, such as (Teenage Diaries), (Kalam al-Nil) ) and (Red Agenda), and they all dealt with the world of women and their various problems.

Muhammad Khan

The late director Muhammad Khan is also one of the Egyptian directors most interested in following the relationship between a man and a woman, as in his film “A Date at Dinner” (1981), where the unhappy wife Nawal (Souad Hosni) seeks a divorce from an authoritarian husband Ezzat (Hussein Fahmy), but things take a turn for the worst.

At dinner, the wife gave her husband poisoned food and told him: “Neither you nor I deserve to live.”

In “The Wife of an Important Man” (1988), Khan represents the psychological and physical violence to which the girl Mona (Mervat Amin) is subjected by her husband, the narcissistic policeman Hisham (Ahmed Zaki), and his cruelty towards her increases from one episode to the next , because he must be the one who has the power in his house and at work, but soon he loses this job and this power, and he goes crazy, the woman tries to escape from his oppression and turns to her father to protect her, but the officer kills him and commits suicide , in the events of a harsh film about married life that turns into hell.

As for his film “Dreams of Hind and Camellia” (1988), the young widow Hind (Aida Riyad) and the divorced Camellia (Najlaa Fathi) are exposed to great psychological and physical abuse, as well as material and sexual exploitation, and in the end stolen.

In his study “The role of Egyptian cinema in the spread of harassment and violence against women”, researcher Yacout El-Deeb believes that the film “Dreams of the Hind and the Camellia” showed different forms of harassment of women, from poverty and the coercion of women to work as maids, the exploitation and violence of the old a miserly husband, and material exploitation, from an unemployed drug-addicted brother, beatings to get money and forced to steal and other issues raised by Khan with the utmost brazenness.

Film 678 and harassment

In 2010, director Mohamed Diab, in his first film, addressed the sexual harassment of women in the film “678”, which bears the number of a public transport bus that becomes the scene of a crime of harassment of one of the heroines. He caught him and took him to the police for criminal proceedings.

The movie “678” presents a solution for dealing with harassment, for a woman to immediately take revenge and injure the person who tried to harass her with a sharp object in a sensitive area. The solution may seem violent and criminal, but what about a woman when she is harassed on a public transport bus in the middle of people, and most of them are ignored, including her screams or cries for help, and she is often accused, even if she was wearing the most modest clothes, just to faced with a society that believes that women’s clothing is the reason for their harassment?

comedy

On the other hand, some comedies in the millennium established the concept of the lover’s ownership of the mistress, even if she and her family rejected it, as in the film “Saye Bahr” (2004) directed by Ali Ragab and written by Bilal Fadl, as we see a young Hassan (Ahmed Helmy) going to his fiancee’s house with his friends, only to expose her in the street and yell, “Oh, you whore, you traitor,” and accuse her of treason by mocking her and her family.

The pioneers of the communication site discussed such scenes after the incident with Mansoura’s girlfriend and how some comic films have cemented in the minds of this generation the inevitability of a lover’s revenge if his beloved rejects him, either by exposing her relationship with him or by threatening that no one else will approach her, but the imagination of these filmmakers never reached the lover slaughtered his beloved, so that the reality would be crueler and more violent.