By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
SIFF Review: Microphone
This charming, energetic film out Egypt — shot before the recent Middle East revolutions — had its inception in the director, Ahmad Abdalla, wandering the streets of Alexandria like a tourist, when some graffiti caught his eye. A little research revealed the graffiti artist to be a 19-year-old girl, and thus was planted the seed for Abdalla to make Microphone, a film about the vibrant underground art and music scene — street art, metal bands, and hip-hop artists, skateboarders and filmmakers — in Alexandria.
Abdalla chose to tell a fictional tale based on the real stories he gathered from the art scene in Alexandria, so what we have here is, essentially, roughly fictionalized re-tellings of the stories the artists told about themselves. This lends the a sense of realism to the story of a prodigal son of a retired musician returning home to Alexandria to uncover a world he never knew existed.
Upon moving back to Alexandria after seven years abroad in the United States, Khaled (Khaled Abol Naga) seeks to reconnect with his lost love, Hadeer (Menna Shalabi), only to find that she is moving on to pursue a PhD in London, leaving Alexandra just as he’s returning. Feeling lost, he wanders the city and, much like Abdalla himself, discovers the street art and gets entangled in the interesting, quirky world of the artists inhabiting the city’s underground scene, caught within the long shadow of religious fundamentalism and a political culture not overbrimming with encouragement for artists to express ideas seen as potentially hostile or controversial.
Khaled finds new passion for life in attempting to pull together resources to encourage, support and showcase these young artists, only to encounter roadblock after roadblock. Through it all, Abdalla nicely interweaves the conversation with Hadeer that sets Khaled in motion with what happens after, working backward from the ending of their encounter as he simultaneously moves forward from the beginning in Khaled’s exploration of the wonderland of the underground scene. It’s a nice touch, and once you figure out what he’s doing, you can appreciate that the scenes with Hadeer tend to feel like Khaled is replaying snippets of the conversation over in his mind as he tries to move on by latching onto the art scene as a conduit for change in himself.
The way it all comes together here almost more like a hybrid of doc and narrative. Abdalla and his small, lean crew use a verite approach in capturing the colors and sounds of Alexandria swirling around their young artists, who defiantly challenge tradition, convention and the status quo.
Surprisingly, the press notes say Abdalla shot the entire film using the video functionality on the relatively inexpensive Canon D7, an SLR camera that also shoots video. I say “surprisingly” because I thought the film looked pretty great. At times the active, roving cinematography reminded me somewhat of both Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop and James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, and at times it reminded me of John Turturro’s Passione in the way in which it evokes the feel of being in this far-flung place and the genuineness of the director’s fondness for the city and its culture. Smart editing choices and bold shot compositions keep the film visually engaging, while the pacing trips blithely along.
Abdalla tells his tale of the struggle of the artistic versus the political in a universal way that crosses cultural boundaries; there is much here that independent artists of all stripes in most any place can relate to in terms of the marginalization of the work of artists, and the uphill battle to educate the public and convince them of the value of art to society.
And yet, I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a completely bad thing that finding the money to make art isn’t all that easy. The romanticized notion of the starving artist — the person, in essence, who values the freedoms afforded by the artistic lifestyle and the ability to create, more than he or she values living a life more conventional and financially secure — is a long-standing tradition that’s maybe not without merit. If you’re willing to live like a pauper in pursuit of your art, you must be really dedicated, right?
There’s also the question of how much the struggle influences the value of the work. Would many of the musicians whose voices we hear in this film be making the kind of passionate, powerful, politically incisive (and occasionally incendiary) music we hear in the film, if they had it easy? If a rich uncle’s money is funding a state-of-the-art studio and equipment and a government grant is paying for your CD, does an artist lose a little street cred, while the artist who struggles to be heard is paid back in respect? If underground art is, at its core, an expression of rebellion against the status quo, then maybe so.
Microphone offers no overly simplistic, easy answers for its passionate young artists struggling to make their voices heard, but it does offer a compelling glimpse of the underground art and political scene in Alexandria, captured up close and personal not long before the country, and the city itself, erupted with cries of revolution and change.
And you can’t help but think while watching Microphone that it’s exactly the kind of spirit and energy and courage we see in the young people abstractly represented by the characters in the film, that surely helped spark that revolution.