Birmingham film-maker Khaled El Hagar reaches an international audience
Dec 7 2009 By Roger Shannon
As New York’s African Diaspora Film Festival brings Khaled El Hagar’s to a wider audience, producer and film professor Roger Shannon profiles the Kings Heath-based film director.
Khaled El Hagar is that rare thing - a Birmingham based international feature film director.
Acknowledged in his home country Egypt as the most controversial movie maker of his generation, Khaled lives quietly for half of the year in Kings Heath where he has established himself as the city’s leading auteur.
Since his move to Birmingham in the late 1980s, Khaled has been a major figure on the film scene in the city, presenting his new films in the then annual Birmingham International Film Festival, picking up awards at the same festival and passing on advice and tips to younger film makers.
Recent years have seen a renewal of support for his film making ambitions in Cairo, where he has been filming almost back to back for the past few years on a range of multi-award winning movies, and re-establishing himself as an A-list director in the Arabic market.
It was his London set and UK-financed film Room To Rent that brought Khaled’s talents to the attention of the international film world, a film that, when Head of Production at the BFI, I had the pleasure of developing with Khaled and then of helping producer Ildiko Kemeny to raise the finance.
The Film Consortium backed the film, with Julie Baines as executive producer.
Since then Khaled El Hagar has built his artistic career shared between his native Egypt and the UK.
It is the depth and the range of his films that resonate with audiences, as he shuttles between cultures and genres with an ease and a versatility, taking in comedies, dance films, popular musicals and contemporary dramas with a social cutting edge, and all filmed with Khaled’s palate of “kitsch bazaar”.
A mini season of his films was presented at MAC, Birmingham’s independent cinema in 2005 but this is the first time that this Egyptian/British director has been honoured at an international Film Festival with a retrospective of his major films.
It is to their credit that the New York African Diaspora Film Festival is the first to do so.
With 23 national and international film awards already to his name, Khaled El Hagar is without doubt one of the most important Egyptian filmmakers of the past two decades and he brings that creative background to the fore as the Filmmaker in Residence at the 17th Annual African Diaspora Film Festival.
Running from November 27th - December 15th 200 in various venues in New York, the festival is showing the following films of Khaled El Hagar: Kobolat Masroka/Stolen Kisses, Mafeesh Gher Keda!/None But That, Hob El Banat/Women’s Love, Room To Rent, Little Dream, A Gulf Between Us, Elements of Mine and You Are My Life.
Kobolat Masroka/Stolen Kisses focuses on nine Egyptians in their 20s faced with common but taboo subjects in Egypt: family conflicts, unemployment, sexual frustration, prostitution and violence.
By keeping an Egyptian voice accessible to the larger audience, this 2009 production kicked off many heated debates in Egypt, including death threats posted on some websites.
