“…disappearance is a misnomer… many prisoners who have ‘disappeared’ may well, at worst, have ceased to be. None, however, is lost or vanished. Living or dead, each is in a very real place.”
Amnesty International
Some time circa 2011 a nameless character flees jail in a major prison escape on the fringes of major political turmoil in Egypt. As he runs in a deserted space away from prison, peripheral bullets from this turmoil reach him. He jumps onto a pickup truck with some other travelers and a passing police truck randomly fires at them. The man next to him dies on the spot and the rest are asked to get off the truck. He walks again. A revolution is unfolding in the background. He eventually reaches home.
He has brought back one thing from prison: hazy footage of the violent prison outbreak on the memory card of a cell phone. The footage opens with a sentence that struggles to stay with us, pops up again and again: “I made this video for people to know what happened.”
As 2013 comes to a close, I walk on a road leading to Mohamed Mahmoud Street, a street that witnessed fierce battles between protesters and police two years ago. I walk down the road in search of some lost memory. But with the many walls that have been constructed to block the roads, remembering becomes somewhat impossible. I go to watch Ahmad Abdalla’s new film “Rags and Tatters” instead.
Here, an unexpected memory is retrieved, one that we did not even have. In the film, vociferous silence and the images lost in the cacophony of the media open up a new venue for consciousness. For 85 minutes the audience travels to some “very real places”: homes to that which is lost, forgotten or unknown. In this vast venue, an array of other stories about this revolution and others emerge, stories that are yet to be told.
The real in these stories is sometimes brought up through documentary interjections into the fiction; people our nameless character meets, who recount stories about their slum lives. In other contexts, the gesture would amount to perhaps another film being socially responsible at the expense of making the fiction strong enough to tell the story. But in Rags and Tatters, Abdalla’s habitual recourse to non-actors and real stories somehow serve the narrative – although still occasionally make it feel contrived.
The mobile phone footage eventually flees forgetfulness by making it into a newspaper that has been collecting stories and videos about the revolution, shortly before its proprietor is lost in yet another faceless battle on the peripheries of the political turmoil. Our nameless character also vanishes in some violence hitting a predominantly Christian community of garbage collectors and recyclers. His story ends in a place where all matter deemed to be waste of Cairo’s bustles is regenerated through a thriving and rigorous recycling economy, and his footage with its quest to “tell people what happened” also survives, perhaps to be reincarnated in other forms and to serve different purposes.
The footage we are left with, just like Rags and Tatters, becomes a document for an impossible memory. In dire times when memory is violently resisted, the film functions as an unexpected refuge.
Rags and Tatters will be screened in commercial cinemas as of Wednesday for one week.
