‘Cairo Time’: Narrowing the Divide

by E. Nina Rothe

Art, by nature, has a transcending quality across all superficial boundaries. While the media, our heads of state, and various religious leaders contribute, to create an even further split between the Arab world and the West, immortal artists like Rumi, Khalil Gibran and Oum Kalthoum continue to inspire and expose generation after generation to the beauty of looking to the Orient.

It is exactly this kind of enlightenment, the undeniable charm of Egypt and its people that has made Ruba Nadda’s latest film ‘Cairo Time,’ a personal favorite of mine, ever since it was released at the Tribeca Film Festival. Luckily, the film opens in theaters around the US and comes to your living rooms, through cable’s On-Demand, on August 6th. I highly recommend viewing it to fall in love with its stars, its magical setting and the beauty of the film’s perfectly woven romance.

This past week, elan caught up with filmmaker Ruba Nadda, and ‘Cairo Time’ stars Alexander Siddig and Patricia Clarkson, at a roundtable in NYC. Nadda is stunning, bright and wonderfully insightful to interview, while Siddig is drop-dead charismatic and positively glows in real life. I said it before and will say it again: his eyes actually sparkle while he speaks to you! Clarkson is, of course, the quintessentially glam movie star, beautiful and funny but totally lacking the “Diva” attitude.

Whether the film succeeds in uniting the divide, between East and West and more importantly perhaps, between the sexes, is up to you to decide.

elan: What did you like most about Cairo?

Patricia Clarkson: I think what I always like the best about any place is the people. The Caireens… I loved them. I was the only American, in the cast and crew, everyone else was Canadian or Egyptian and I didn’t know how they would react to me. It was a beautiful experience getting to know the city and the people who live there.

Ruba Nadda: I quite loved that city. There’s something that happens to you when you enter that time zone. It’s such a chaotic city that it forces you to chill out. Your blackberry stops working, your cell phone stops working and nobody cares. Everyone is on this very relaxed state and so the things that annoy you, you end up falling in love with in the end. Hence the title of the film, it’s ‘Cairo Time.’ The thing I most love about Cairo is that I found the people to be so sweet. So generous. You can’t walk down an alleyway without a lovely family living in a dilapidated house with no roof insisting they invite you in because they want to have a conversation with you. There’s something so humane about that city and yet it’s so impossible to shoot in Cairo, I didn’t let on to my producers how difficult it would be. I was scared they would say, “No, forget it!”

Alexander Siddig: I’m quite a romantic, so I’d sit in my hotel room and look out over the Nile and one can tell that the Nile brought with it the stories of central Africa and deposited it in the Mediterranean. Africa has always been such a devastated continent, has so many tragic stories and this river bears witness to that. I read way too much of Keats when I was younger, I’m way too overly romantic. I was moved by the romanticism of the place and the ancientness of the rocks.

elan: In our current world of misconceptions, do you Ruba and Siddig, as hyphenated Arabs – for lack of a better way of describing it – feel that you carry a special responsibility to the artistic choices you make?

Ruba Nadda: I was born in Montreal, Canada, my father is Syrian and my mom is Palestinian. I lived in Canada my entire life but for a few years we lived in Syria, in Damascus, on and off for about four years. So I speak the language fluently. I feel like I’m Canadian but also have the Arab blood. Sometimes, we have said this before (motions to Siddig) we just feel confused. But because I am Arab, I think it’s really important for me as an artist, a storyteller, filmmaker not to become obsessed with identity. At the end of the day, the audience wants to be entertained, to be told a story. So the most effective way I can get across my beliefs about my culture, Arab men, Muslim women is by telling a very entertaining story, set up as a romance. My political convictions and ideas and ideologies, don’t need to be in the film, those are my beliefs. You can be subtle about it. Because I have traveled so much with my films to festivals around the world, I find that audiences are really smart. So they feel when you are being heavy-handed about it. I just try to be as subtle and simple as possible to tell my story.

Alexander Siddig: Unlike this refreshing creature (motions to Nadda) I have intellectual pretensions. In 2001 when the shit hit the fan… I can finally say it that way now. It’s been a long time since becoming Arab was a front and center part of my personality in a way that it had never been. Till then, I’d been getting away with being just some guy with a weird name… Australian? Yeah, really, some cab driver asked me if my name was Australian. So now suddenly I had to face up to this new music and I sort of excised the anger and defensiveness over a series of movies. In front of people, which is an interesting way of living, I suppose. I did parts in various films, from ‘The Hamburg Cell,’ which was a first look at the personal lives of the suicide bombers, very controversial. The film had an American backer that backed out once they saw the first three or four frames of the film in rough-cut. Then Ridley Scott, one of the most unlikely political bridge-builder – ‘Black Hawk Down’ was a travesty as far as “bridge-building” – wrote this amazing part for an amazing actor called Ghassan Masood (the Syrian actor who plays Saladin in the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’) and I play his sidekick. That was a learning process for me because I went ”Wow, Hollywood, MAJOR Hollywood is now looking to show the gentler side of the Arab archetype”. I began to relax and by the time I arrived here, at ‘Cairo Time’, I wasn’t angry or defensive anymore. I still liked to be able to introduce people to Arab men, my Arab man… MY ARAB man, but I don’t worry, and I’m not angry or vulnerable anymore.

elan: Speaking of that Siddig, how much freedom and responsibility did you feel to portray the quintessential Arab man in the role of Tareq?

Alexander Siddig: I don’t feel that responsibility. I cannot be all Arab men. I don’t even feel that I am. I’m playing just another guy, and people can respond to that any way they want to. I quite like the idea that a few people who have never met an Arab man may now feel that they know one. And freedom… Ruba never gave me directions, as in ”This is the kind of man I want you to come up with.” I think she was relying on what happened, what fizzed between Patricia and I, and this stuff that she’d already seen me do and maybe bring that to the table. She did give me one thing. I’d never met him, but she said I reminded her of her father, which is a lot of information. That really is a lot of information. That’s like a book. You don’t need to tell me any more, that was really useful! She also gave me limitless freedom. There was never a moment when she said no. Not once. Between Patricia and Ruba, there were no walls or barriers.

Ruba Nadda: I actually wrote the role for him. I’m a big fan of his. I know you hate to hear it, but I watched ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’, I loved him on that. My dad watched that. I’ve been watching his career for a while. As a writer you try not to write with someone in mind but he was it. There is such a misconception of what an Arab looks like and how an Arab man or woman are supposed to be. I love my father and he’s just a lovely, lovely man. He’s raised three girls to be feminists.

I’ve had so many people come up to me and say they’ve fallen in love with the character of Tareq. I mean it’s hard not to put people in boxes. I think Siddig’s helped greatly. I’m excited and we’re working on our next movie together. It’s a thriller this time.

elan: How was taking ‘Cairo Time’ to Qatar last fall, for the inaugural Doha Tribeca Film Festival there?

Patricia Clarkson: Oh wow. That was a remarkable time. The Qataris really embraced it in such a huge way that it became the closing night film, with 3000 people on the lawn in Doha. Sir Ben Kingsley was there, and he came up and made a specific point of saying how much he loved it. He said ”No one left, 3000 people no one left!” And Sir Ben is truthful! It was again a different culture, a different space but we were treated so beautifully in Doha. I don’t even know where to begin. We didn’t want to leave. The most beautiful part of what I got to do in Doha was, you know the Emir gave an extraordinary amount of money after Katrina, and I am a native New Orleanian. He made an exceptional donation to my hometown and the people of my hometown, and I got to thank him at the press conference. Which was a highlight for me. It was incredibly moving and powerful to be there and I know it made it to him. So I was thankful for that.

Ruba Nadda: I am always nervous taking my movies back to the Middle East. Because the way they look at films is very different from the way North America and Europe look at films. It’s not even just about being chaste, I think sometimes Arabs in the Middle East view me as if I should be a spokesperson and so they feel I should be making movies about the plight of Palestine, for example. I was nervous about taking the film to Doha. But it turned out to be an absolutely beautiful experience. We showed it at the beginning and then, out of demand, it was chosen to close the festival, outside, in front of 3,000 people. And the irony is that it was all these people, from all different walks of life, that just usually don’t go to see a North American movie and they all absolutely loved it and related to it. The film was premiered in Cairo at the Cairo Film Festival and I was scared about that too, but we ended up getting a standing ovation. And that really, really meant a lot.

All images courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival