Teaching Empathy and Compassion: Nahr el-Bared and the Plight of Palestinians in Lebanon

Nahr el-Bared, 2013.

The story of the destruction of Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in 2007, at the hands of the Lebanese Armed Forces, is one among so many atrocities, that it is no wonder that we have moved on from it with haste. But I firmly believe that in history, rather than the current event, lies a greater capacity to understand the world.  Today, I want to impress upon my colleagues who teach courses about the inhumanity of warfare or military oppression across history, the importance of using filmic documentary, oral histories and testimonies of victims, in their classrooms. The war front of the Palestinian struggle for survival has never been a green line or the shifting and changing imperial alliances. Now more than ever, it is a public relations contest. 

There is tremendous power in simply showing who the victims of aggressive government policies are. I have taught students who are so far removed from the reality of war that it had never occurred to them that a simple affirmation of support of military action translates into someone’s nervous breakdown or a woman’s own familial holocaust, or a child’s lost limb, or an adult’s lifetime of displacement and post-traumatic stress disorder. Of the millions of children who perished in the Nazi holocaust, we keenly feel the loss of Anne Frank more so than the others. Why? Because human beings do not have a capacity to sympathize with faceless, anonymous masses. We need to be shown individuals, we need to have the horror of war translated into a singular, personal experience. And this is exactly why I taught the Diary of Anne Frank alongside Mahmoud Darwish’s diary, Memory for Forgetfulness, and why I taught Art Spieglman’s graphic masterpiece, Maus, alongside Joe Sacco’s graphic novel, Palestine. In doing so, there was no escaping the collective humanity of the victims and the individual horror of people caught in machinations of extraordinarily unnecessary loss and destruction. 

Some of you may remember that the university where I taught made the decision to excise the Palestinian content. I walked away from that battle because, put simply, the insidious psychological warfare had by that point ravished and decimated my soul, and had taken such a toll on me that I, in the absence of collegial, personal and institutional support,  was not able to stand up and fight. I admire the likes of Steven Salaita who did, and won. I did not win, but I have survived and I can still write and I still have the privilege of a voice that is heard and words that are read.

Much talk of Israeli apartheid exists but we have yet to name the Lebanese apartheid, we have yet to just as loudly acknowledge the depth and breadth of Lebanese oppression of Palestinians. Nahr al-Bared Talks Back is an important documentary film that collects oral histories from survivors and gives a palatable context to the depth and breadth of the oppression that students will be able to relate to and find palatable. The film has all but disappeared. Its official website http://www.nahrelbaredfilm.org/ is no longer in use and the Norwegian institution (CMI) which funded the project offers no viewing or institutional purchasing options. For this reason, I choose to discuss some of the film’s content here.

The film tells us that Nahr el-Bared refugee camp was founded in 1949 and is located near the Lebanese Syrian border, in the far north, some fifteen kilometers beyond the city of Tripoli. The camp was and is home to Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948, most of whom had fled Galilee at that time. The film does not tell us that Nahr el-Bared is actually two camp sites, the original one and another that began to be settled in nearby rural plains as the refugee population increased. Like other camps in Lebanon, Nahr el-Bared, prior to its destruction, was organized into suburbs that reflected the names of the locations from which various people come. For example, those who were displaced in 1948 from Sa3sa3, now lived in a neighborhood called Sa3sa3, and those who had once lived in Safad now lived in the Safad neighborhood of the camp.

Palestinians have an extraordinary way of preserving the Palestine they were forced to flee in 1948 in a relentless and tenacious collective memory. I recall one woman from Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut telling me how she had visualized the Palestinian village she came from, because her grandmother had given her such vivid accounts of the place. One day, she said, a news report was showing images from the village and she was able to recognize it even before the reporter named the location. She said the experience felt surreal -- to have known a place she had never been was spiritually elevating.  After the Lebanese Armed Forces destroyed the old camp and with the new reconstruction underway, these old neighborhoods have been erased; the social and cultural fabric of a people numerously displaced, faces further potential erosion. It is a little known fact that the Lebanese Armed Forces targeted the original campsite in their relentless 4-month destruction, when the alleged reason for their bombing, to destroy an Islamist group known as Fateh al-Islam, should have targeted the newer campsite where the two hundred or so fighters had taken fort.¹

One resident of the camp with whom I found myself in conversation, had lived there all his life and was now working in Beirut. He reminisced that after the end of the Lebanese civil war, Nahr el Bared experienced a time of commercial prosperity.  He recalled that in those days the best road from Tripoli and across to the Syrian border actually ran through the camp, leading to an influx of traffic, and by consequence, commerce. What’s more, the resident added, merchandise was competitively priced, making camp merchants the more desirable resource for shoppers from outside. This was due to the camp’s proximity to the docking ports near Tripoli, he added. The Lebanese Armed Forces completely razed the camp to the ground. Gone was that commercial stretch of highway and even as late as 2013, when I visited six years after the battle, the roads had still not been repaved. Much of the destruction was not even yet removed. An UNRWA School had been built, a modest facility, which stands in sharp contrast to its surrounds. A new school is to be found but no reasonable roadway leading to it or any of the infrastructure one would normally associate with a brand new school building. Looking out of the window from one of the classrooms, another one of my companions pointed to the skeletal remains of ghost buildings in the distance. “I had an apartment in that building over there. Every time I look at it, I get angry,” she said. 

Nahr el-Bared, 2013

Nahr el-Bared residents did not take up arms to defend the camp, because no one felt that this battle was theirs. No one had any desire to defend Fateh al-Islam who were a foreign militant entity, seeking to establish an Islamic emirate,² spilling out of the conflict in Syria and into Lebanon’s north. For this reason too, the then Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Signiora, declared that the Palestinian people were not the target of the military’s assault and had regrettably been caught in the cross fire. While this was symbolically all nice and fluffy, the actuality on the ground couldn’t be far from the truth. The behavior of the Lebanese soldiers was remorseless in many instances, as the film Nahr el-Bared Talks Back recounts through survivor testimony. A young man tells us how he and a group of other young men were detained and stripped naked, while some were beaten, and all were interrogated for no legitimate reason other than that they had remained in the camp when most others had fled. In his soft, evidently traumatized voice, he tells us:

When [the soldier] asked me why I was still in the camp, I told him, “why, where do I live? I live in the camp.” He asked me “why didn’t you leave with the people who left?” I told him “ I didn’t know things were going to get this bad. I was sitting in my house. In the end I’m not Fateh Islam.” He asked me what I did. He was asking every single guy what he did for a living. So for example, one of the young men told him “I’m a mechanic.” The officer told him “you worked as a mechanic, or did you fix machines and tools for Fateh al-Islam? Another guy told him “I’m a baker,” and so he said to him “so you used to bake and make food for Fateh al-Islam?” When he came to me he asked me what do I do for a living. I told him “I’m a musician, I play at parties and weddings.”  He went quiet. What could he say, when I tell him “music,” of course he couldn’t say to me “you used to play music for Fateh al-Islam.”

Another survivor, recounting his detention also wonders how, given the military restriction under which the Palestinian camp exists, was it possible for Fateh al-Islam to nest in the camp and to bring in so much arsenal with which they were able to fight the Lebanese army. When every Palestinian has to enter at a military checkpoint, showing a residential ID and when every outsider or foreigner must have a permit to enter the camp, how did Fateh al-Islam manage what they did? Sociologists Ismael Shaykh Hassan and Sari Hanafi contend that the origins of the group can be traced back to the allegedly secular Fatah al-Intifada, a militarized faction that was armed by the Syrian regime in Lebanon’s far north in the 1980s in opposition to the remaining PLO fighters who had withdrawn from elsewhere in Lebanon.³

An off-screen man curates the graffiti left by Lebanese soldiers on the ruins, among them are: “Thank you Shaker al-Abbsi [one of the three leaders of Fateh al-Islam, responsible for a contingent of fifty Palestinian fighters, predominantly hailing from Syria⁴] because you allowed us to enter Ali Baba’s Grotto.” The reference to Ali Babba’s Grotto must be in relation to the looting and ransacking that took place, given that the mythical grotto was full of untold riches.  Other graffiti reads “In revenge for al-Abbas.” And “In revenge for al-Damour.”  While al-Damour references a Lebanese coastal town that saw fierce fighting between al-Kata’eb and the PLO during the Lebanese civil war some two decades earlier, al-Abbas may be in reference to Mohamad Zeidan, the Palestinian political leader who founded the Palestinian Liberation Front in Lebanon. Off screen, the graffiti’s curator passionately tells us that this graffiti demonstrates that “this was a war programmed not against Fateh al-Islam but against the Palestinian people.” Given the final statistics, one can see the off-screen curator’s reason for believing this. In eliminating less than 250 Fateh al-Islam fighters, the Lebanese Armed Forces managed to kill approximately 40 Palestinian civilians as collateral damage and to displace and further impoverish 30, 000 camp residents. Many of them, to this day still live in the neighboring camp of al-Badawi, still awaiting reconstruction of their homes, eight years later. The Armed Forces’ brutal decimation of Nahr el-Bared was not met with condemnation. In fact, the heavy handed assault was hailed as a victory against global terrorism. Nahr el-Bared Talks Back tells a more important story, it tells the story of those whose voices are actively muzzled, preventing us from hearing their dignified and very human call for justice. As one man, speaking to a foreign camera, in the midst of the siege, says:

We are a people who have been unjustly treated (mathloomeen). If they want to exterminate us and kill us, let them kill us, but before they kill us they shouldn’t also be unjust toward us. Please convey to the international general public that we are trapped here with our children, and we can’t find water, and we can’t find bread, and we can’t find medicine. 

Notes

¹This point is illuminated by Ismael Shaykh Hassan and Sari Hanafi in their critical and in-depth study “(In)Security and Reconstruction in Post-Conflict Nahr Al-Barid Refugee Camp,” published in the Journal of Palestine Studies XL(1), 2010: 34.

² ibid, 33

³ Briefly after the end of the Israeli invasion in 2006, Hassan and Hanafi contend, that a “large group of Salafist militants arrived in Nahr al-Barid camp during that period as part of the well-established and ostensibly secular Fatah al-Intifada faction through the intervention of its Damascus-based general secretary, Abu Khaled Amleh. The newcomers initially remained within the faction’s military bases, supposedly as members, but it appears that an internal coup had taken place in which the Salafists had essentially taken over Fatah al-Intifada’s bases for themselves. On 26 November 2006, the man subsequently revealed to be the group’s leader, Shakir al-Abssi, announced the creation of Fatah al-Islam” (ibid, 32).

⁴ Fatah al-Islam’s “decidedly nonlocal character was confirmed by the Lebanese Judiciary Council, which listed its composition as follows: 69 Lebanese nationals, approximately 50 Palestinians (the vast majority from Syria), 43 Saudis, 12 Syrians, 1 Tunisian, 1 Algerian, 1 Yemeni, and 1 Iraqi” (ibid, 33).

Filmmakers Who Feature Arab Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Characters

Yes, I dared to use “Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual,” partly because the films themselves depicted identities, not simply behaviors, and partly because I have never really found it epistemically pernicious to engage in cultural translations and historical equivalencies. A lot has happened since the publication of Chapter 6 of Female Homosexuality in the Middle East. That was the chapter in which I discussed a number of mainstream Egyptian films that depicted some form of queer text, character or subtext. Here are some films that came out in the last decade that are just waiting for some serious analytical attention.

Tool ‘Omri/All My Life (2008)
Made on a shoe string budget, with a non-professional cast and crew, this is one of my favorite gay Arab films. Don’t be put off by the independent-film budget, pay attention to the dialogue and rejoice in the power of a community-driven production. Set before and during the Cairo 52 case that rocked the Egyptian homosexual underworld in 2001, filmed in Egypt and San Francisco, the film is written and directed by Maher Sabry, himself an Egyptian exile who had to flee state persecution
Just in case you have been living in a hermitage in the Himalayas for the past fifteen years, the Cairo 52 case was an incident in which Egyptian police raided a gay nightclub, a show boat named the Queen Boat that was moored on the Nile. The police arrested 52 Egyptian men predominantly from the impoverished classes. The arrests were followed by a pernicious trial which was covered extensively in the media (and John Scagliotti’s documentary film Dangerous Living). Sabry was one of the whistle-blowers who alerted LGBT rights organizations to the arrests and for this he won the Felipa De Souza award in 2002. Maher Sabry was interviewed, albeit briefly, for Scaglioti’s film and also appeared in the short documentary I Exist (2003), although the depth and breadth of his creative intellect is yet to be explored in a feature interview.

There is a lot to love about Sabry’s film! I am not in the least deterred by the allegation that it contained “gratuitous nudity,” making it “just another gay film.” Nor am I deterred by the occasionally grainy acting or low budget filming, because there is a consistent intersectional critique throughout the film, the intelligence of which you are not likely to see in “just another gay film.” For example, I love that Sabry, probably in the tradition of Ihna Btoo’ il-Otobyss (1979), shows police brutality and torture in Egyptian prisons. That he is able to tell the stories of men persecuted by the state in this way, alone deserves a mark of respect.

I also admire how Sabry is able to demonstrate the privileges accorded to Western citizenship and/or socioeconomic status, which translate into being “above the law,” since state police seem to invariably target men who cannot pay their way through the system or who do not have the right connections to protect them. Sabry also shows that exclusive homosexuality can operate without epistemological and identitarian tentacles, just as we see in the case of the country boy, Atef (played by Maged), who lacks the pretension of his modernized counterpart, Rami (Mazen Nassar). Atef’s character stands in sharp contrast to Abd Raboh, the “he’s not really a homosexual” character, played by Bassem Samra, in the blockbuster film, The Yacoubian Building (2006). Abd Raboh, also a peasant from the country, is depicted in a such a way as to reinforce the stereotype that homosexuals are passive parties and whose active partners are, if anything, hypersexual heterosexuals, because their penetration of other men makes the latter women.

One gripe you could have with Tool ‘Omry, which I don’t really share, is that there are no real female characters in the film. Dalia, Rami’s best friend, is a virginal, sexless angel, more or less. But Jwana, the actor who played Dalia and the film’s co-producer, passionately disagrees. “Dalia….grew tired of fighting and struggling on a daily basis in a religious society. After she moved to San Francisco, [and] like so many other free-thinker women of al-mahjar, she wanted to do something to change the miserable state of our Arab world. We all know the rest of the real story and what happened to hundreds of Dalias in Tahrir.”

In light of the renewed persecution of gay men in Egypt (following Mona al-Iraqi’s TV exposé of an alleged gay bathhouse in Ramsys in 2014), the film needs to be seen by audiences worldwide, now more than ever. The recent Egyptian law permitting the state to deport foreign nationals for homosexual activity, also changes the landscape since Sabry’s film, which was critical of the privilege accorded by the State to sex tourists hailing from the West. Unfortunately, as vital as this film is to international discussions, an English release of the DVD has not yet transpired. And since the film is predominantly in Arabic (YouTube preview not withstanding), it is now out of reach to English-speaking audiences. The great news is, seven years later, the English-subtitle DVD release is due this year, according to the film’s co-producer (and co-actor), Bassam Kassab. On an interesting side note, the French subtitles of the film were written by Remi Lange, the writer and director of Tariq il Hob/The Road to Love (2001), another excellent, low-budget independent gay film we are going to be having a look at below. Rémi Lange is also the distributor of the French DVD version of Tool ‘Omri in France, Belgium and Switzerland. The film has also been released with German sub-titles in Germany and Austria. I cannot stress it enough, this is not a film to be missed.

If you find Sabry’s work compelling, you might be happy to learn that he and Bassam Kassab teamed up on another feature-length, Sin Visa, which was directed by Ana Simões and premiered at the landmark Roxie Theatre, in San Francisco, earlier this year. Sin Visa contains a gay Arab couple and sees Kassab’s return to the big screen as writer and actor sporting that same infectious grin we see in his role as minor character, Hatem, in Tool ‘Omry.

Tarik il-Hob/The Road to Love (2001)

Tariq il-Hob predates Tool ‘Omry by six years, and it was co-written and directed by the French Filmmaker Remi Lange and released in 2001. With the exception of one word (I believe, it’s “inshalla”) the entire film’s dialogue is in French. It is set predominantly in Paris, with perhaps the last twenty minutes of the film being shot in Morocco. Lange does a very interesting job of telling the story of Karim (played by Karim Tarek), a sociology student who decides to do one of his assignments, a video documentary, on homosexuality among men of North African descent in Paris. At that point, Karim has a girlfriend named Sihem (played by Sihem Benamoune) and hasn’t really given much thought to exploring his sexuality beyond his relationship with her. He soon meets one of his interviewees, a handsome young man named Farid (Riyad Echahi) and the story line unfolds predictably around Karim coming to terms with attraction to a patient, yet unrelenting Farid. If Tool ‘Omry was ever criticized for brandishing too much nudity, surprisingly, Tariq il Hob abstains from gratuity. On the contrary, it approaches male homosexual attraction with an unusual emphasis on emotions, and the need for bonds of certitude, and does not depict male sexuality in the usual fast-pace-disposability we see in gay male cinema generally speaking. At the same time, it does not represent gay men as the typically castrated homosexuals suitable for mainstream consumption—the film finds a healthy and invigorating balance. Lange’s films are not for mainstream audiences, and Tarik il-Hob made the rounds in the LGBT film festival circuit, so there is something to be said about his choice to resist giving the stereotypical film viewer what they came for (no pun intended). The DVD of Tariq il-Hob is available for purchase, along with English subtitles, it also includes extra footage that didn’t make it into the final cut.

My personal delight in this film is seeing a very young Abdallah Taia after the release of his first book, which, he complains elicited no response from his home country, Morocco. Of course, fast forward thirteen years and Taia is writing editorials in the New York Times, publishing critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical works and even making a directorial debut as a filmmaker himself. It is Taia also who discusses the homosexual marriage contracts found in the Egyptian Oasis of Siwa at the turn of the twentieth century, and it is from him again that we hear about a city in Algeria, which in the 1950s, is said to have also had a tradition of homosexual marriage contracts. I also felt that the inclusion of references to Rumi and Jean Genet were both particularly apt endeavors on the part of the writers to claim culturally-specific same-sex sexual encounters, histories and personages, contrasting them with a more contemporary violence, particularly targeted at the so called “passive” homosexual man. Like Tool ‘Omry, it’s not surprising that women are represented by one minority character and in this instance it’s Sihem, Karim’s girlfriend, who makes a gracious and early exit that allows him to further explore his sense of self.

Sukar Banat/Caramel (2007)

Nadine Labaki’s debut film is gorgeous. It was the film chosen for the Arab Film Festival’s opening night in Sydney, where I first beheld it in 2008. In his opening remarks about the film, University of Melbourne Professor of Anthropology, Ghassan Hage, said that it was a film whose critique of Lebanese social ills was “made with love,” and he was right. It’s nice enough watching a film made by a woman director, but the film also has a soft spot, an open wound—the dull, subtle pain of which, lingers long after the film has ended. To trivialize it, we can call it a “chick flick,” since it centers on the lives of a group of women who are brought together in humorous scenes at Leila’s (played by Labaki) hair dressing salon. Leila is dating a married man, whom we never see because he stands her up. We see her trying to book a hotel room in Beirut, having no luck, since she doesn’t have proof of her marital relationship, a restriction I was not aware was still observed in cosmopolitan Beirut. Her assistant and friend, Nisrine (Yasmine al-Masri), has a hymen reconstruction procedure because she cannot bring herself to tell her fiancée that she is not a virgin, while her other friend, Jamale (Gisèle Aouad), is a single mother of two and an actress, who fakes her menses and actively lies about her age in an effort to remain competitive with younger, more beautiful women in an industry of substantial cruelty to women.

If it weren’t for Leila’s co-worker at the salon, Rima (Joanna Moukarzel), the film would not make this list. Rima is an interesting character in a film that endeavors to catalogue the tragic restrictions imposed on women socially, whether that they must compete for beauty and youth or feign chastity or be treated like play things by married men. Enter Rima who, we are shown, is not interested in the young man who clearly wants to initiate some kind of romantic involvement. She is also lovingly chastised by her friends for her lack of self-beautification. We see her get mobbed by her friends and subjected to waxing of her body hairs in anticipation of Nisrine’s wedding. We also see Rima give what may seem like a look of longing, an expression of both loneliness and alienation, when a woman sits next to her on the bus. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much get communicated without words about sexuality in an Arabic-language film before. No one ever says that Rima is a lesbian, we don’t see her go out on dates with women, she never articulates the reasons for her seeming alienation, but it’s further intimated in her interaction with a salon patron who comes in regularly to have her hair washed. At the end of the film, that patron asks to her have her long hair cut short, which for some reason or another, is a symbol for breaking away with society and tradition.

Placed in context of the film as a whole, it’s clear that Rima is another archetype of woman who is not being given the space to assert individuality or to live comfortably, according to her desires. She is a likeable character, albeit marginal to the film, and her depiction is a safe one. There’s nothing confronting about her; mainstream audience members may not even have it register on their radar that she may be anything other than a quiet, shy and lonely girl. But, I think that kind of sensibility is effective; it’s not pushing the envelope too far, it’s not starting a conversation about a subject, which for many, remains unspeakable, but it is acknowledging the subject’s existence and the silences that are built up around such existences.

Bidoon Raqaba/Uncensored (2009)

Anyone who has read enough of my work probably notices that I am not a fan of critique for critique’s sake. I find that kind of pompousness tiresome. It’s like we academics have to find something lacking in everything we see in order to justify our salaries. But frankly, I did have to suffer through this film to give you this little note on it. But before we get to the suffering, let’s focus on the joy. The film was entertaining, in part, because it was a film about university students in their final year of their law degrees, and the film contains so many party scenes involving disaffected youth getting drunk or high, that might invoke, for some, memories (or lack thereof) of misspent youth. I also liked that all the sex that is had in this film is defiantly non-marital in a country experiencing a religious backlash. The God-fearing character, Ibrahim (played by Bassem Samrah from The Yacoubian Building and Sarkhat Untha), who spends much of the film sermonizing to his “lost” friends about abstaining from sex and alcohol, and observing prayer, turns out to be human after all, with the same desires as his peers. He is depicted as reprehensible and hypocritical by the end of the film, no doubt a critique of the Muslim brotherhood and their discourse. This connects comfortable with Sabry’s depiction of his repressed fundamentalist character, Ahmad, in Tool ‘Omry.

There are a lot of elements in the film on which its makers ought to be commended, but I found the 4 or 5 music video clips interspersed throughout this film excruciating to sit through. For example, seemingly out of nowhere, the main character (played by well-known Egyptian singer, Ahmad Fahmi) suddenly bursts into song. The filmmaker, Hani Georges Fawzi, was perhaps trying to capitalize on Fahmi’s fan base, but sitting through the sudden music clips was definitely a first-world problem I would have been happy to fast forward through.

I’m also slightly, but not very, disappointed in Shareen (Alaa’ Ghanem), the resident bisexual character in this film. I am glad she made it on screen and was given some unapologetic, self-asserting lines that we have never heard on the Egyptian cinema screen before. I am not glad that she is depicted as a sexual predator of innocent women, and that her background story is that she had been preyed on in seventh grade by her cousin who initiates her into homosexual behavior. I know the film, which is ironically titled Uncensored, was in fact censored several times and there were many compromises that had to be made with the censorship board for its release to be allowed, so I do wonder what the authors had to compromise on and whether Shareen’s character was different from what she ended up being. Nonetheless, despite the depictions of her predatory behavior of uninitiated women, Shareen delivers some lines for which one is infinitely grateful, given the context of the film’s audience and the pernicious stereotypes that permeate about same-sex desire and behavior. And given the film is not accessible in English subtitles, we will wrap up this article resolving that accessibility issue. Enjoy!

After Shareen sleeps with a male friend of hers, Karim, he asks her “when you’re with a girl, which one of you is the man and which is the woman?” To this she replies: “What stupidity is this? Are we in a group of morons or what?”

“No, but seriously, you two are the same, how do you do these things?”

“Like what you and I were doing now.”

“But that’s natural. A man and a woman.”

“And when I’m with a girl, I’m acting according to my nature.”

“Ok, what do you feel when you are with them?”

“What you feel when you are with me.”

“Well, then, which one are you? The man or the woman?”

“I’m both.”

In a scene a little later on in the film, we see Shareen with her new love interest, a girl procured for her by a friend, who says to her that she is not comfortable with what they are doing together. “This is haram [forbidden]. I heard a sheikh say this is haram.” Shareen replies: “Oh, and you didn’t hear the Sheikh who said eating cucumbers was forbidden?” Shareen is not joking, absurd fatwas (religious decrees) are released intermittently, and the forbiddance of eating cucumbers, since they resemble the phallus, is not an invention of her own imagination. But perhaps my favorite line by Shareen is when she is speaking to Ibrahim, the religiously observant character who asks her to repent and stop defying God (but is actually interested in sleeping with her). “We both defy God, but I don’t lie to myself, while you don’t know how to lie to people.” These comments are particularly powerful in light of the renewed popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a country that has been grappling with its social and cultural identity, oscillating between liberalism and religious conservatism, since independence was attained in the 1950s.

Finally, I appreciate this film and its Shareen because she does not die at the end! Nor does she turn out to be a vampire! Two usual endings that the Hollywood celluloid bisexual still meets with.

*Originally published on July 25, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/filmmakers-who-feature-arab-gay-lesbian-and-bisexual-characters/  now discontinued.