KNOW WHO FOC S O GERU MANYN by Tala l Al M
Iman Kamel
uhanna
Iman Kamel Cairo-born filmmaker Iman Kamel moved to Berlin in 1987 – after which she followed interdisciplinary studies in art, dance and film at the Berlin School of Arts. Her 2002 short film Hologram – a work in which she sought to fuse her birth city of Cairo with her adopted city of Berlin - received a Euromed Short Film Award in 2004 and was launched on the internet at www. euromedcafe.org. A proponent of richly visual, experimental and poetical cinemas, Kamel had delivered a poem to her cinematographer May Rigler shortly before the pair’s departure for Cairo to make Hologram – a poem which would eventually form the basis of their fruitful work together once they arrived in Egypt. Says Kamel: “I wanted her (May) to travel her first time to Cairo with eyes like a newborn.” For the longdeparted filmmaker, however, the process of returning to Egypt as a tourist and a stranger was “a seismographic moment” in her life.
Berlin-based Egyptian filmmaker Iman Kamel (third from left) travelled to the Sinai Peninsula in 2008 to film with the Bedouin women of the Al Gabalia tribe for her project Beit Sha’ar (‘house of hair’).
In 2008, true to her nomadic instincts, Kamel and cinematographer Ute Freund – the camerawoman for the 2006 Student Academy Awardwinning Ausreisser (Runaway) - packed their bags and headed deep into the deserts of the Sinai Peninsula to create a documentary project that would be the first of its kind: an intimate portrait of the Bedouin women of the Al Gabalia tribe in central Sinai. The process marked an interesting foray into cross-cultural, boundary-defying filmmaking both for the filmmakers and their subjects. Not only was it officially forbidden for the two-woman crew to actively shoot such a project in the militarised region they were entering (a place where Kamel would have to assume the protective guise of a “university professor studying local bird-life”) but many of the Bedouin tribeswomen they wished to film were reluctant to fully reveal their faces to the camera during the documenting of their day-to-day lives. Eventually, a number of tribeswomen defied this taboo and shared their stories willingly with Kamel. The gradual building-up of trust not only between the tribeswoman and Kamel but also with her accompanying crew member, is perhaps best marked by the tribeswomen’s affectionate referral to the non-Arabic-speaking German camerawoman Ute as “Oot el elub” (‘crystal of the heart’ in local dialect).
Highlighted Project: Beit Sha’ar/Nomad’s Home (Germany/Egypt/Kuwait /U.A.E., HDV, 2010)
In 2009, Beit Sha’ar/Nomad’s Home was presented as a work-in-progress at both ‘Cinema-in-Motion 5’ during the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain and
Kamel’s other artistic collaborators on Beit Sha’ar (English language title: Nomad’s Home) include her long-time Berlin-based editor Klaudia Begic, the Hamburg-based dramaturge Klaus Freund and the notable German composer Frieder Butzmann.
at the Dubai Film Connection during the 6th Dubai International Film Festival. Since the film’s inception it has been the recipient of a production grant from the MAMA Cash fund in Holland and the recipient of post-production funding from the DEMO Completion Fund in the U.A.E.
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