Birmingham-based filmmaker, Khaled El Hagar is at the top of his game
Khaled El Hagar is that rare thing – a Birmingham-based international feature film director. Acknowledged in his home country of Egypt as the most controversial movie maker of his generation, Khaled lives quietly for part of the year in Kings Heath.
With 30 national and international film awards to his name, he is one of the most important Egyptian filmmakers of the past two decades and recently tasted success with the greatest triumph of his career by scooping best international film with El Shooq (Lust) at the 34th Cairo International Film Festival.
The film also reunited the film maker with fellow graduate of the UK’s National Film and Television School, Nestor Calvo, who was director of photography on El Shooq.
“For El Shooq to win this award feels like Egypt has won the World Cup,” Khaled explains. “For me it was a mix of dream and sad realty. A dream, because finally I have won the big award in my own country, after many years of struggling to get my name in the A list of directors. My films always generate a strong controversy in Egypt and the Arab world. The award for me was an award for all my hard work as a film maker who wanted to improve the quality of his home cinema, and to speak about what I feel.”
The film was controversial in Egypt, even before release and there were moves to prevent it representing Egypt at the Cairo Film Festival because it was deemed to portray his home country in a negative light.
“Myself and Sayed Ragab, the writer, and Nestor Calvo, the camerman, tried to create an unreal world from the real world of poor Egypt. Yes, it’s a shocking film and it’s sad, but that’s the film I wanted to make.”
El Shooq takes us into the lives of the inhabitants of a marginalised street in Alexandria. Familiar, moving and funny, each character is isolated in his or her fierce, yet fragile dreams. The central character is Umm Shooq, a woman whose sense of shame and inadequacy drives her to gain some leverage over the little world in which she lives, in the hope her dire financial situation will improve. Umm Shooq takes her daily journey around the neighbourhood, selling coffee beans and using her talent for reading the dregs of used Turkish coffee cups to provide a glimpse of her customers’ future.
