“This film depicts the awakening of long-pent-up sentiments; it is a humanitarian massage for members of all religions.” This is how director Nadia Kamel described her long documentary-drama Salata Baladi. The name is in itself indicative. Baladi salad—a mix of diced cucumber, tomato, lettuce, green pepper, radish, watercress, dill and any other fresh salad vegetables in season, topped with onion—is a staple dish on Egyptian tables. The words ‘baladi salad’ are, however, commonly used to indicate any random mixture of things or events.
The film depicts the yearning of members of a large family who all belong to different nationalities and who had met and intermarried in the cosmopolitan Egypt of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, but were later separated by the wars and enmities of the region, to again unite. The film was awarded a prize at the Arab Film Festival of 2007.
The longing
Salata Baladi is the first film of its kind, with some scenes shot in Palestine and others filmed in Israel. It is also the first to handle such a thorny, albeit humane, topic.
The story is autobiographical, depicting the director’s own family. It begins with the grandson, 10-year-old Nabil, who with his father is taking part in the dawn Eid prayers in the mosque. The general Eid rejoicing is marred with the sermon of the sheikh, who adopts the by-now common attitude of dividing the world into Muslims and the ‘enemies of Muslims’. The father hates that type of rhetoric and, as he heads home with his son, counters by attempting to introduce Nabil to the concepts of pluralism and co-existence. He begins with the story of Nabil’s grandmother Mary. Mary, who is now 80 years old, is an Italian who was born to a Christian mother and a Jewish father. She came to Egypt as a child with her family, settled there and later married a Muslim man, Saad Kamel. The family, which is today Muslim, thus had Christian relatives in Italy as well as Jewish relatives who had left Egypt and Italy and settled in Israel.
Eager to hear his family’s story first-hand from his grandmother, Nabil hurries to Mary and asks for all the details. As she relates the long-shelved memories, it is obvious that she longs to see the relatives and childhood friends she had left behind so long ago.
Poignant
Mary’s children sense her yearning and offer to arrange for her to visit Italy, which she does and comes back elated. So far, nothing out of the ordinary.
But the most controversial move comes when she decides that she wishes to meet her cousins who had left in 1946 for Israel, and again her family arranges for a visit. To start with, the matter necessitates patience since the decision is a point of contention with many of the family members. While the ‘religious’ Egyptian Muslim relatives oppose the visit, which they see as active ‘naturalisation’ with the Jews, encouragement comes from the Palestinian friends of the family who dismiss fears that the visit is a ‘betrayal’ of the Palestinian cause.
And so Mary goes to Israel. One of the most moving and poignant scenes in the film is her fist encounter with the cousin she had not seen since they were children. Mary also meets many other old friends, and they converse in Arabic, English, French, Italian, and Hebrew. It is a veritable baladi salad of peoples and tongues. Linguistic, religious and national barriers, and political enmity, all vanish into thin air.
Mary returns home to Egypt invigorated and happy. Her neighbours and friends do not censure her, but appear to display quiet understanding and comfort. A feel-good movie, a dream perhaps, but possibly closer than one dares hope.
Taboo
Robeir al-Faris
As in the case of docu-drams, the film was not screened in cinema theatres, but was twice shown at the Goethe cultural centre in Cairo. On both occasions crowds filled the hall. Sadly, it was not to share in a rich, humane experience, but to outwardly express their animosity and antagonism towards the makers of the film whom they described as “traitors and ‘naturalisers’ with the Jews”.
One of the remarkable comments I heard in the hall was an incredulous exclamation: ‘hey…the Jew is laughing!’- as though Jews belonged to a species other than that of all mankind, or came from another planet. A scene in which a Palestinian woman says that ‘the lack of implementing naturalisation has harmed Palestine on the social, political and economic level’ induced heated comments to the effect that such talk would never be voiced by any patriotic Palestinian.
Due to the scathing criticism directed at the director Nadia Kamel after the screening, she did not to attend the second show.
Regrettably, both the Cairo International Film Festival and the Ismaïliya international Documentary Festival refused to host the film or even present it on the sidelines of their activities, for fears of its being understood as a call for naturalisation with Israel, an issue that has today gained all the proportions of taboo.