Cheap comedy dominates Egyptian cinema

CAIRO -18 April 2017: Egyptian cinema was formerly known as one of the most prestigious cinema industries in the world to the extent that it used to stand in competition with Hollywood movies.

Starting from early 2000s Egyptian cinema got mobilized by worthless comedies until our current day.

The psychological state of Egyptians has always been reflected in cinema hence, the melodramatic films of the 1940s portrayed Egyptians’ worst crisis in life is to try reaching their significant other. In the 1970s, there were musical and romantic comedy films targeting the Egyptian youth hipsters and drama films portraying government’s corruption of the 1980s.

Each era was reflected on films, whether it was a portrayal of the reality or commercial films that mainly aimed at garnering profits.

Comedy movies have a huge market in Egypt. Judging by the current state of Egyptian’s hectic daily life, along with all its chaos and problems, cheap comedy movies serve as an escape for many Egyptians, which in turn helped it dominate movie theatres and box office every single season.

The plague of cheap comedy movies also referred to as “Al-Sobky Syndrome”, in reference to an Egyptian production company that initiated this bizarre comedy genre, started to erupt in 2002 after the release of the famed comedy film “Al- Lemby”.

Al-Lemby was a ground breaking film, as it introduced the criteria that current films are now applying. These criteria include creating naive and ludicrous characters, which are attacked by a series of unfortunate events throughout the film without a reasonable ending or a certain beginning of why a certain climax took place.

The main target of any film production company is gaining profits; therefore they started creating a sort of a replication system where all comedy films started to blindly copy each other during the early 2000s, yet the real form of replication took place after the 25 January Revolution in 2011.

For the last six years, cheap comedy films have been the trending genre during every holiday season to the extent that the same cast of actors can be seen in various films in a single season, and the audience is just enjoying this bizarre nonsense.

This type of comedy films can be considered as a brainwashing system for many Egyptians as they will walk outside of the theatre in content by watching absolute funny nonsense.

There might be some different genres that come up in Egyptian theatres every now and then, but they do not achieve the same amount of profits comparing to comedy ones.

Currently, it is the spring break film season in Egypt and all films featured in cinemas fall under the genre of cheap comedy featuring the same actors.

This is catastrophic because ever since the establishment of Egyptian cinema there has always been a variety of genres; yet this phenomenon is degrading other genres and hindering chances of new aspiring actors to work in the film industry in Egypt.