ABU DHABI: After working as a war cameraman for 18 years and getting injured twice on the job, Egyptian journalist Ibrahim El Batout decided to get away from real-life violence and make movies. But his latest venture El Ott or The Cat, which premiered this week at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, does not shy away from blood.
The film stars Egyptian actor Amr Waked, who most recently appeared alongside Scarlett Johansson in Luc Besson’s Lucy, as a gangster searching for his kidnapped daughter, a quest that exposes the grimmest side of life in Cairo’s slums.
A still from The Cat
The 51-year-old director, who has won awards for his documentaries, started making feature films in 2004. The Cat is his fifth and, by far, most violent movie. From organ trafficking to child marriages, The Cat addresses problems that are little explored in Egyptian cinema. In one of the opening scenes, organ traffickers remove the kidneys from kidnapped street children, dumping their bodies. A girl is saved from the same fate only when her kidnappers decide they can make more money selling her off into a child marriage.
“I specifically said to myself this time I want to see blood and violence in this film because it hurts me,” said Batout. “It hurts me to know that we have more than four million homeless kids on the street and it hurts to see how women are dealt with as a commodity in this part of the world,” he added. A recent study by the Egyptian government put the number of street children at three million while some non-governmental organisations say it is four million.
“When I started making fiction, it was because I hated reality. I wanted to create a reality that I could deal with,” Batout said. The overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 2011 meant Batout witnessed some of the kind of violence he had seen in conflicts in Iran, Iraq, Rwanda and Chechnya, but this time, in his own country. “It caused me to relive all what I was escaping from in my films,” he commented. “I had been careful before not to project too much negativity on the viewers, but then I thought, ‘What am I doing? Why am I covering this up?’”
The Cat’s star, Waked, worked on a documentary in the slum neighbourhood where the movie was shot, and met dozens of people who had sold their kidneys for less than $1,500. “Can you imagine it was for as little as that? There are people who are poor and working three shifts to support their families, but it is still not enough,” said Waked.
Batout added, “It’s like so many things that don’t make sense in our lives, things that are not logical at all and somehow, we continue to live with them. So, making movies about them becomes one way of healing for me.” Despite centralising women’s rights, there are no big female roles in the movie, something Batout said was a deliberate choice. “This is so because that is what it is like for them in the real world, it is the men who are dominating.”
The Cat is the second collaboration between Batout and Waked, who believes the subject matter will have global appeal and will cause a stir in Egyptian cinemas. “I think it will definitely be controversial,” the actor said.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 1st, 2014.
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