Documentary maker Sherief Elkatsha[/caption]
Documentary maker Sherief Elkatsha captures the chaos of the capital’s streets in his latest film Cairo Drive
By Sherif Awad
(Cairo Drive is showing at the art house cinema Zawya from January 8–14. For more information, visit the Zawya website www.zawyacinema.com.)
Cairo’s traffic has always been an interesting and funny subject for Egyptian filmmakers and singers to tackle. In the late 1970s, folkloric singer Ahmed Adaweya sang Zahma ya Donya Zahama (Crowded, the World is Crowded), a song popular in taxi cabs and microbuses cruising all over the city. Later, in 1996, filmmaker Khairy Beshara directed the feature film Isharet Muroor (Traffic Light), about a group of people caught up in traffic in the middle of one Cairo street. For up and coming Egyptian-American documentary maker Sherief Elkatsha, traffic across the congested streets of Cairo is full of diverse real-life characters—from taxi drivers to ambulance attendants, traffic cops to normal citizens. The website for his latest film, Cairo Drive, sums up his quest to capture “the unspoken codes of conduct, frustrations, humor, fatalism and life-or-death decisions of driving in a city where the only rule is: there are no rules.”
Elkatsha was born in Ohio to an Egyptian father who had immigrated to the United States in the days of President Nasser. An official in General Electric, Elkatsha’s father was reassigned to the company’s Cairo office in 1980, so the whole Elkatsha family found themselves living in the capital for the next 11 years. During that period, Elkatsha graduated high school from Cairo American College (CAC) in the southern suburb of Maadi, then he went back to the US to finish his higher education at Boston University, majoring in Communications with an emphasis on cinema.
“I started to work on feature films like Boys Don’t Cry (1996) building props and sets,” recalls Elkatsha, who travels back and forth to Egypt. “I also worked in the Muppets Studio in the Upper East Side of New York for three years doing the same thing until I decided to make my own films. After working in many types of production, I found out that documentaries should be my main goal.”
In 2006, Elkatsha debuted with the documentary Butts Out, telling the stories of five American smokers and their struggles to quit. The 58-minute film got the Best Documentary Award at the New England Film and Video Festival that same year, also screening at The Rhode Island International Film Festival, Rendez-Vous with Madness Film Festival and the Hollywood DV Festival.
Shayfeen.com: We’re Watching You was Elkatsha’s following documentary, which he co-directed with Jehane Noujaim, the Egyptian-American director now famous for her Oscar-nominated documentary The Square. Shot in 2005, the film followed “the first multi-party elections in Egypt during Mubarak’s regime through the eyes of three women working to assure the election’s legitimacy through the NGO Shayfeen.com, which translates as we are watching you,” says Elkatsha. “When we were working on that documentary, we got the feeling that a revolution in Egypt was going to take place, sooner or later.”
Four years later, Elkatsha returned to Cairo to shoot Cairo Drive. It was a challenging experience from day one, as he tried to get a license to film across the streets of the crowded city. “Even though, I was my own cinematographer and I was shooting from inside the passenger seat of taxi cabs, I needed to secure permits from the State Information Service, the national entity dealing with the foreign filmmakers and press coming to work in Egypt.”
Shooting lasted for many months to come, and Elkatsha laughs as he remembers how camera-shy the drivers and pedestrians were. “Some people have this feeling against the camera, so all the time they were telling me, ‘What are you shooting?’ or ‘Stop what you are doing!’”
Cairo Drive premiered November 2013 at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival then crossed the Atlantic to True/False Film Fest in Colombia, Missouri last March before premiering in Egypt at the 17th Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts last June. “I think the audience outside of Egypt responded in a very positive way to the Egyptian characters as showed in the film,” observes Elkatsha. “The Egyptians are dealing with the difficulties of daily life with a great sense of humor, finding the lightheartedness in everything.”
Being a documentary filmmaker based in the States makes it difficult to get funds for projects. “In the States, we rely on the Public Broadcasting Service aka PBS to get funds for documentaries,” explains Elkatsha. “On the other hand, the rest of the funds are easy to get from European countries, but in that case one must have a European crew member working in the film. Also for documentaries, you can write what you want in proposals for funds but in the end, the footage you will be able to get is what will make your film. For Cairo Drive, I financed all by myself and secured a first cut, then I launched an IndieGoGo Crowdfunding campaign to polish the film in post-production.”
Next for Elkatsha is a documentary about women playing drums across the world. “One of them is a beautiful young Egyptian woman called Sabrine El Hossamy, who plays the goblet drum, or darbuka, that is made out of Nile fish skin” Elkatsha reveals. “I used some of Sabrine’s music in Cairo Drive, and I think it will be interesting to document her musical performances mixing Jazz and Oriental music in my next film.”
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