Accept me as I am
Her reputation was founded on sex – but that’s just one of the topics straight-talking actress Hend Sabri thinks needs bringing out into the open if Arab cinema is to matter
WORDS ANDREW HUMPHREYS
PORTRAITS MICHAEL CLEMENT
WHEN US FILM-MAKER JONATHAN DEMME MADE PHILADELPHIA IN 1993, it was the first high-profile Hollywood film to deal with Aids. In reviewing the film, The New York Times noted that the director (best known for The Silence of the Lambs) was someone who thrived on taking chances, but said that this film represented ‘the biggest gamble of all’. Demme had his work cut out, the paper said, to overcome ‘stubborn preconceptions’ and the opprobrium the subject matter would inevitably attract.
That was almost 20 years ago but, even so, you can imagine how much more of a risk it might be to make a movie about Aids in Egypt. This is, after all, a country in which state-owned newspaper Al-Liwaa al-Islami could probably be said to represent the views of many when, some years ago, it ran a story headlined: ‘Aids is God’s punishment for all those who pollute the country with their sins’.
In the Egyptian film Asmaa, the second feature by 29-year-old director Amr Salama, the HIV-infected widow at the heart of the story is played by Tunisian actress Hend Sabri. Tackling such a taboo subject head-on is a brave step for an actress, but Sabri is no stranger to controversial roles. Back in 2001, her breakthrough came when she took a role in a film – Diary of a Teenager (Mothakarat Morahiqa) – that no Egyptian actresses would consider because it involved kissing and the suggestion of sex outside marriage. Made the same year, A Citizen, a Detective and a Thief (Mowaten we Mokhbar we Haramy) also had Sabri engaged in risqué love scenes.
At the time, Egyptian film was dominated by what was called ‘clean cinema’ – films funded by money from the Gulf States in which all the lead characters were good and virtuous, and the villains pantomime drunkards and drug addicts. Diary of a Teenager was not a clean film, and it helped create a certain image of Sabri – as an actress with ‘fewer moral inhibitions than her Egyptian counterparts’, as one journalist put it. It also made her hot box-office property across the Arab-speaking world. If that comes across as shallow and calculating – a pretty 21-year-old unknown hits the headlines through her sexy onscreen antics – Sabri says it was nothing of the sort.
‘In Tunisia we are very Mediterranean, very close to Italy and France. We’re the most open-minded in the region. When I first arrived in Egypt, I didn’t understand those differences and I didn’t know where the boundaries were. But I never lost the respect of the audience because it was clear from the beginning that I wasn’t there just for the fame and glamour, or to be kissed. I was there because I loved cinema.’
That love of the cinema, she says, came from her childhood in Tunis, where she was raised by liberal, well-educated parents who had a passion for the arts. At a party her lawyer father was approached by a highly regarded local film director, who told him his 15-year-old daughter had a great face for the camera. He suggested she audition for a film he was writing. Sabri was reluctant, but her parents encouraged her and she got the part. She was subsequently offered a role in a second film which, when it was screened at the Carthage Film Festival, was seen by Inas al-Degheidy, an Egyptian director looking to cast her next project, Diary of a Teenager. ‘She called me and said, “I have a script that I think you’d be good for. There’s a kiss or two, but please read it and tell me what you think.” That’s how I moved to Egypt. Nothing was planned. I’m very lucky; I didn’t have to audition and knock on doors and say, “Please take me.” My career owes a lot to fate and destiny.’
Despite the impact she made with her Egyptian debut, it took time for Sabri to find her feet in her new hometown of Cairo. She accepted parts in a few mainstream vehicles, but was never happy with the outcome. ‘It’s not easy to find the right roles,’ she says. ‘That’s why I don’t work much.’ Her output has rarely risen above one or two films a year, but among them have been some of the industry’s better recent efforts – notably big-budget, star-studded epic The Yacoubian Building. The film not only broke box-office records in Egypt, but attracted critical acclaim at film festivals around the world. It represented something of a victory for Egypt’s liberals, enjoying mass appeal while being far from a ‘clean’ movie. Sabri played an impoverished young woman who endures sexual exploitation in order to earn a living – although it was the film’s depiction of a gay romance that caused some of the country’s lawmakers to take to the floor of the People’s Assembly in protest.
Its director, Marwan Hamed, is one of a new generation of film-making talent in Egypt, bringing about what Sabri believes is nothing less than a cinematic revolution, led by ‘children of social networking and YouTube’. Amr Salama – the director of Asmaa – is another.
Asmaa evolved out of a documentary on Aids in Egypt that Salama made six years ago. During filming, none of the interviewees dared show their faces on screen as they were scared how they might be treated if their neighbours, friends and even family members found out about their condition. Salama felt that this unjust state of affairs needed highlighting.
As well as directing, Salama wrote the screenplay. He always had Hend Sabri in mind for the title role of the HIV-positive woman who, tired of being terrified that her condition might be exposed, decides to go on live TV and make a pitch for public understanding for the victims of Aids. ‘I’m not very sentimental and I don’t cry at films, but when I read the first draft of Asmaa there were two or three lines that did make me cry,’ says Sabri. ‘It’s so rare that I instantly decided I had to do this film.’
Once Sabri was onboard she met regularly with members of Cairo’s HIV community to talk about their lives. She was appalled at what she learnt. ‘Any kind of sickness is unfair, but living in fear of even telling anyone! I met a woman who is 50-something now; her kids are in their 20s and they don’t know. Can you imagine living like that?’
One person she never met was the woman on whom the character of Asmaa was based: she died before filming began. ‘Her story was even sadder than Asmaa’s. Her children kicked her out of her home, so she used to live in the hospital. She had to clean her own room because none of the hospital workers would do it. They kept kicking her out of the hospital and she kept coming back. I’m telling you this now and you believe me, but if we’d put her real story on screen you wouldn’t have believed it.’
Sabri’s hope, shared with Salama and the Aids sufferers they met, is that the film might provoke a public conversation in which society starts to question its attitudes toward the HIV-positive community. ‘This film is not only about Aids,’ says Sabri. ‘It’s about second-class citizenship. It’s about people in the Arab world who know they have rights, but don’t know how to get them.’
Actors banging on about human rights may be a cliché, but Sabri has more credibility than most. She holds a Masters in law, gained in 2004, and since 2009 has carried out humanitarian work with the World Food Programme, acting as an ‘Ambassador against Hunger’.
No surprise, then, to learn she was in Tahrir Square this January. ‘My husband was literally sleeping in Tahrir, so if I wanted to see him I had to go down to the square. I went the day before Mubarak stepped down, which was a very heavy day because everybody had lost hope. What happened next was unbelievable, a real rollercoaster of emotion.’
Few people recognised the actress that day because, she says, she was ‘really, really, really fat’ – seven months pregnant with her first child, a daughter who was born in April and named Alya (‘Heaven’). Those who did hardly cared who she was, she says. ‘Egyptians weren’t interested in fame or celebrities: all they cared about was the regime being toppled. Tahrir Square was Utopia – it was where Egyptians discovered the best of themselves and their own potential.’
Things have moved on since then, and the utopian spirit of Spring has well and truly dissipated. ‘I don’t know if it’s going to come back,’ says Sabri, whose view of the current situation is glumly down to earth. She has no doubt that any future elections will see the Islamists taking power. ‘If they did it in Tunisia [in October the Islamist An-Nahda party won 40 percent of the vote in the country’s first free elections], they will in Egypt.’
It is, she says, something that the liberals, the progressives, the educated elite, the secularists (‘we call ourselves by many names; they call us “non-believers”’) are just going to have to live with. ‘I don’t agree with all those Tunisians who since the elections say they’re going to flee the country. This is not the solution. I love Islam; it’s my religion, but I do not believe in political Islam. Religion is my relationship with my God and politics shouldn’t be involved in it. The Islamists need to accept me as I accept them.’
Life under an overtly Islamic government may be something Sabri feels she can cope with, but she is pessimistic about the short-term future of cinema in the region. ‘Under the old regime, censorship was mainly political. If you didn’t bother them politically, then you were fine. If the Islamists come to power, censorship is going to become much heavier.’
Would she consider moving abroad to work in European cinema or in Hollywood? She’s trilingual (Arabic, English and French), Western in outlook and someone who has spoken approvingly in the past of Hollywood as a place where ‘movies peak without boundaries’, so it would seem a logical move. Sabri thinks otherwise. ‘After the exposure The Yacoubian Building got, I was approached by several international agents and for a while I had an agent in Paris. But I know the parts I’d get: the poor Arab wife whose husband is a terrorist or whose father beats her. This is not what Arab women are about. I am an Arab woman and I live in the Arab world, and I know how rich our stories are. I would rather empower Arab women in the Middle East and be their voice. It is fashionable these days in Hollywood to make films about Arabs, but I’d rather be the number-one actress here than number 2,500 in Hollywood.’
