Mexico Conquered the Oscars. Why Are Arab Directors Still Locked Out?
Guillermo del Toro's Oscar is the fourth for a Mexican director in five years. Del Toro, Iñárritu and Cuarón explain the film languages that took them to the top of Hollywood, and Arab film-makers explain what still keeps them outside.
The Academy Award for best director that Guillermo del Toro won this year for The Shape of Water was the fourth for a Mexican director in five years. His friends Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu won it before him, Cuarón for Gravity (2013) and Iñárritu for Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015). The two Arab films nominated this year, Lebanon’s The Insult and Syria’s Last Men in Aleppo, both went home empty-handed, and Arab cinema is still without the prize. How did Mexican film-makers reach the summit of Hollywood and collect its highest honours while Arab directors are still knocking at its doors?
The Three Amigos
Mexican cinema was built on romances and popular television serials until three directors emerged in the 1990s: del Toro, Cuarón and Iñárritu, known as the Three Amigos. They revived it by developing the tools and methods of cinema. Each of them invented a film language of his own and used it to raise human, social and political questions that matter in Mexico and resonate around the world.
Del Toro lifted horror and fantasy by blending them with real events, historical or contemporary. In 2001 he used that blend in The Devil’s Backbone to expose the ugliness of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s through the eyes of an orphaned boy. In 2006 he used the same tools to treat the same subject through the eyes of a girl in Pan’s Labyrinth, which won three Academy Awards. He also worked in Hollywood on big films such as Hellboy and Pacific Rim, and then made The Shape of Water, in which he mixed several genres.
Fantasy, like imaginative horror, was born alongside cinema itself, with Méliès, del Toro says. He sees it as a dark mirror of society that has produced some of the greatest and most legendary scenes in the history of film, a legitimate, beautiful and powerful contender in cinema, and he treats it accordingly. He describes himself as a teller of fables who takes the shapes, colours and characters of horror cinema and uses them to tell fantastical tales, which is why his films are a mixture of things. The Shape of Water, he says, is a musical, a melodrama, a spy film and a romance, and the way it tells its story is deeply political. Every act and every decision in a horror film is political.
In the thriller Amores Perros, Iñárritu used non-linear storytelling to tell the stories of three characters connected only by a road accident, through which he criticised social corruption in Mexico. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in 2001, which opened Hollywood’s doors to him, and there he went on inventing and refining cinematic methods. In 2014 he presented Birdman as though it were a single continuous shot, and it brought him three Oscars: best director, best original screenplay and best picture. In 2015 he shot The Revenant in chronological order and with natural light, and won the directing Oscar for the second year running.
Iñárritu believes that the form of a film and its content are tightly bound to each other. When you have something to say, he explains, the way you construct it is the form, and the way you express it reveals a great deal about what you are saying. Vocabulary, words and the other tools are available to everyone, but whoever uses words correctly, or more precisely, expresses a position with greater force. The tools of cinema are open to all, he says. You only have to choose your film language and use those tools and the grammar of cinema to tell your story in the best way.
In 2001 Cuarón directed the controversial comedy Y Tu Mamá También, in which he used a documentary style of shooting to raise Mexican social and political issues. It earned an Oscar nomination and cleared his path to big Hollywood films such as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Children of Men, and then to Gravity, where he devised a new cinematic method by using new technology to film his characters in the vacuum of space. He was honoured with two Oscars, for directing and for editing.
When he was making Children of Men, Cuarón says, he was told that one particular shot was impossible, so his team developed a tool to achieve it. With Gravity he did not start shooting until technology had been developed that let him realise the film as he saw it. He is always trying out different cinematic tools, he says, and technology helped him to develop a new one.
Arab cinema at the door
Until the beginning of the 21st century, Egyptian films were the main source of Arab cinema, and they still draw audiences in every part of the Arab world. Most of them, however, have been commercial films of a local character that rarely find acceptance outside the Arab world or win international prizes.
The Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, who made The Insult, says that watching Arab films leaves him disappointed because of the standard of the performances and the dialogue.
For all the size of Egypt’s film output, the only Egyptian film to be nominated for an Oscar is a documentary by the Egyptian-American director Jehane Noujaim, The Square, which followed the events of the Egyptian revolution from 2011 to 2013.
Noujaim thinks the film succeeded because it addressed its subject at a very fitting time, when the world is connected and many people follow an event on the other side of the planet in a way that has perhaps never been seen before. The film is also universal, she says. Its characters struggle to improve their lives and change their country, and they fight for something far bigger than themselves.
Arab documentaries found international attention after the Arab Spring. Karama Has No Walls, by the Yemeni director Sara Ishaq, was nominated for best documentary short in 2014. 5 Broken Cameras, by the Palestinian Emad Burnat, was nominated for best documentary feature in 2013, and Last Men in Aleppo, by the Syrian Feras Fayyad, was nominated in the same category this year.
Tragedies and wars develop people’s vision and their view of humanity, Fayyad says. Look at the art produced after the Second World War, he says, and you see how it evolved, gave rise to great and important schools and changed our view of art, of war and of politics. The same can be seen in the war in Syria. Films certainly have a political dimension and a human one, he says, and documentaries will be the forerunners of narrative films.
Five films in Arabic
Films competing for best foreign-language film represent the countries that submit them, whoever directs them. On paper, ten Arab films have been nominated and one of them won, in 1969: Algeria’s Z, which was directed by a Greek, Costa-Gavras, and made in French. Four other Algerian nominees were also not in Arabic. That leaves five nominated films in Arabic: Paradise Now and Omar from Palestine, Theeb from Jordan, Timbuktu from Mauritania and The Insult from Lebanon.
Paradise Now (2005), by the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, was therefore the first Arabic-language film to be nominated for an Oscar. It also won the Golden Globe, the only Arab film to have done so. In 2013 Abu-Assad was nominated again for Omar, the only Arab nominee produced at home without foreign participation.
For Abu-Assad, identity always means the human identity we all share, which is why he puts ordinary characters into extraordinary circumstances. The world is small, he says, and one power dominates it: American power, through its military, its culture and Hollywood. That leaves two choices. You deal with that power and learn from it, so as to look again at yourself and at others, or you step outside that frame.
That may be what drew Oscar voters to Theeb, in which the Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar used the style of the Hollywood western to tell a story from Arab history and heritage. Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu dealt with the violence of extremist Islamist groups against local people when they occupied the Malian city of Timbuktu, and its release coincided with the Islamic State’s seizure of parts of Iraq and Syria.
Oscar nominations matter no less than wins. They opened Hollywood’s doors to Abu-Assad as they had opened them to the Mexican directors, and last year he became the first Palestinian to direct a big Hollywood studio film, The Mountain Between Us, starring Kate Winslet and Idris Elba.
In his view, making two films that were nominated for the Oscar, one of which won the Golden Globe, has earned him a place in world cinema as a whole, well beyond Hollywood.
Many factors help a national cinema to develop, among them investment in training and supporting talent and budgets for making and promoting films. The road to the Oscars, though, appears to run through local subjects with universal human meaning, explored with refined cinematic tools and methods.
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