Here are 5 artistic facts related to cinema and its industry, the evolution of viewing mediums, audience relationships, and the production team of the film "Ahlaw Wa Ahlaw" (Wissam Smira, 2022) that may help you understand the broader context of the film.
5 - Starting from Scratch
"Netflix" is a subscription-based film viewing platform that also produces films from various countries and in multiple languages. Although Arab cinema has a long-standing history as an industry that began over 120 years ago, supported by thousands of writers with stories and scripts, the global platform chose to produce its first Arabic feature film as an Arabic-language version of a Western-origin format. Thus, while new histories are being written in the world of cinema, and as the forms and relationships of viewing between the audience and the medium change, history will always remember this: the first Arabic film produced by the largest global cinema platform is not of Arab origin. This resembles, in terms of storytelling creativity, starting from scratch.
4 - Outdoing "Shakespeare"
The new approach that has started to become widespread, previously applied in television drama, is the globalization of the cinematic film, creating a single version and then selling it like a "franchise," to be produced under a list of "conditions and standards" in various languages and with different crews from around the world. In essence, cinema has always been a global art form that touches on the ideas and feelings of humans regardless of their diverse backgrounds. Films that have portrayed stories from local cultures and isolated communities have even resonated broadly with audiences in other countries and places. Then came the phase of co-productions, and crossing the boundaries of continents by cinema distribution companies, creating a new form of globalized film. This led to what is now termed "the third franchise." Before the invention of cinema, theater was an art form suitable for early globalization, as texts by "Shakespeare" and "Chekhov" were created and presented in different languages on stages around the world.
3 - An Unprecedented Opportunity for Actor Eccentricity
The personality of an acting artist is characterized by several psychological traits: a love of competition, appearing before others, embodiment, challenge, and an unconscious, continuous transition between the "superego" and the "ego," between anxiety and satisfaction in achieving success. We can imagine the professional excitement that Nadine Labaki, Mona Zaki, or any member of the cast felt as they compared their performances with those of 18 counterparts around the world. For an artist to compete with such a large number of their peers from different cultures, backgrounds, and abilities is certainly a tempting and provocative opportunity for any actor's artistic temperament.
2 - "If a Dog Bites a Man"
We all know that fundamental saying in media and marketing, which links the dissemination of news to the oddity of the idea. Many critics of the film, including social media followers, journalists, human rights activists, and politicians, considered the film to have breached an unusual margin in Egyptian cinema (specifically) by addressing "sensitive" topics in speech, language, and performance, as articulated by a woman. This dimension, which critics deemed "peculiar," provided a free marketing campaign that flared up like wildfire for the film, which jumped to viewer rankings on the platform shortly after its release. We must remember that there are over 467 million Arabic speakers, among whom several million have access to the platform. This translates to astronomical viewing numbers and increased profitability for the film's producers. In business logic, this promises similar experiences to be repeated in the near future, based on the famous Egyptian proverb "The one who is defeated has his plate returned." The golden saying in promotion is: "If a dog bites a man, that's not news; but if a man bites a dog, that's news!"
1 - Welcome to Egypt!
In the version by Lebanese director Wissam Smira, there are two Egyptian characters among the group of friends, with the script indicating from the start that they live in Lebanon with their children and the mother of the husband due to work and professional stability. Meanwhile, all other characters appearing in the film, whether at the loud dinner table or through revealing phone interventions, are of Lebanese identity. This diversity isn't necessary in the original Italian version of the film "Perfect Strangers" (Paolo Genovese, 2016). However, its inclusion in the Lebanese version was dictated by three criteria: the involvement of Egyptian production money in the film, which logically necessitates the presence of an Egyptian actor; secondly, the need for the film to resonate with a large and influential block, namely the Egyptian audience, which would interact with it (in various forms of interaction as we saw) much better with the presence of an Egyptian actor. The third and most crucial reason is to leverage the rising stardom of Mona Zaki, significantly propelled by her recent Ramadan series "Newton's Game" (Tamer Mohsen, 2021), without overlooking Eyad Nassar, who excels in most of his roles and is always eager to take on fresh acting challenges.
The representation of Egyptian actors in films shot in Lebanon has a historical depth exceeding seventy years.
