Cairo Time

A stranger in a strange land

Whenever someone asks me where I 'm from, I say I don't know.

Ruba Nadda

director, Ruba Nadda

Movies are transporting - magic carpets which waft us aloft into captivating domains we would otherwise never visit. I cannot recall, for example, the last movie I saw, set in sensual Cairo. (Raiders of the Lost Ark and Purple Rose of Cairo don't count. Mavens had two suggestions: The English Patient and The Yacoubian Building )

Cairo Time's magic carpet takes us of course to pyramids, the Nile, sukhs, hookah bars, camels and the white desert. But director Ruba Nadda is after something more.

Who Ruba Nadda is, tells us much about what Cairo Time is all about. She was born here in Montreal, grew up in Manitoba, B.C. Several times, her family shuttled back and forth to Damascus, before settling finally in Toronto. She studied filmmaking at NYU, then returned to Toronto, where she has made an array of shorts with provocative titles (Slut (1999); Blue Turning Grey Over You (1999); I Would Suffer Cold Hands for You (1999); I Always Come To You (2001). Cairo Time is her fourth movie.) Nadda is also a prolific poet/writer.

Here's one of her poems:

.................................
my 11 year old sister is on fire
.................................

my 11 year old sister
is on fire

she sits at her desk
and dreams up

of lies to tell her friends
then she

lies in bed and wonders
what it is like

to kiss boys, she tries to
shut the talk shows

in the other room out along with
her mother's soft crying

she trys to memorize lines
so she can write

her poetry the next day
she is a little girl

who has overheard a secret about her
sister and who is now too scared to

close her eyes

she calls
me late

saturday and asks me if it is
true, says ruba, i can't

believe you
i'm on fire

.................................

She says of her own upbringing, Whenever someone asks me where I'm from, I say I don't know.

I guess so.

Growing up Canadian and Arab and female in a peripatetic Syrian-Canadian family, she must indeed have felt a stranger in a strange land.

With Cairo Time, the luminescent Patricia Clarkson, not Ruba Nadda, is the stranger in the strange land - a land within Nadda's comfort zone, but utterly bewildering to the Clarkson character, Juliette, wife of a Canadian diplomat. She encounters a suave Omar Sharif character. They play chess, they float on the Nile, they discuss the superficiality of Canadian women's magazines.

She surrenders her stodgy Canadianness, puts down her her iMac, picks up her hookah, attempts to work through her culture shock – shifting from trying to understand to accepting that she never will. She gets on a Gaza-bound bus, and the Israelis kick her off. She doesn’t get why.

Her husband the Canadian diplomat, running a refugee camp in Gaza, can't meet up. Work, doncha know! He seems no better equipped to deal with his own strangerness in an even more strange land. Gaza.

And so it goes.











Patricia Clarkson & Alexander Siddig


Web Resources:

Before the screening, mavens might log onto some Cairo Time material on the web, which will provide you with background about the filmmakers, the stars and the production:

On our website, my-pov.ca, we've posted the Cairo Time trailer, which reflects Cairo Time's languid lush caramel cinematography.

On YouTube are three enchanting clips from TIFF, invues with Ruba Nadda, Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig, the male lead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT36gawbrdo

Also a short documentary for Sabah, Nadda's last movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brl-H9LBab0