Why does Arab cinema not win an Oscar?

Over the past 62 years, 13 Arab countries have sent 125 films to the American Academy of Film Arts and Sciences to compete for the Best Foreign Language Film Award (currently the best international film), and in recent years at least 6 countries have nominated their films annually for the award, although the records of the Academy are attributed to an Arab country Winning the award half a century ago, in addition to the arrival of 8 other films to the list of final nominations, most of them were recently within 5 consecutive years, the Arab films' path to this award faces many difficulties despite it seems the easiest.

The history of Arab filmmakers begins with this award in 1958, when Egypt chose the film "Bab al-Hadid" by the great director Youssef Chahine, for its representation in the 31st edition of the award [1].

Egypt began to open up regularly to international festivals since the early 1950s, especially the "Cannes" Film Festival, which appeared mainly to offset the influence of the Venice Festival of Mussolini's fascist government [2]. The weight of the French festival increased after World War II.

However, after the tripartite aggression against Egypt in 1956, the Egyptians refrained from sending their films to the "Cannes" festival, while Egypt enjoyed good relations with the United States of America.

Shaheen was still at the time, being influenced by Hollywood cinema, and with his desire for a continued international presence, the Oscar became a suitable alternative, as his film competed with only 9 other films, but it did not reach the stage of nominations.

The Arab history of the Oscars continued with an Egyptian signature until 1970 when Algeria submitted its first film to the Academy, the film that recorded the only Oscar winning mark for an Arab country.

The film "Z", by the Greek-French director Costa Gavras, tells the story of the assassination of a Greek democratic politician. It carries an Algerian footprint in funding only. It cannot be considered a national film in any of its aspects, which was repeated with the films "Le Bal" and "Dust of Life" Who put Algeria twice in the final nominations list.

Despite this, Algeria holds two marks with final nominations through the films "Days of Glory", in the 2007 version of the award, and "Outside the Law" in 2011, and the two films directed by Rachid Bouchareb.

And there is another false start for Morocco in 1951 with the film "Othello" by Orson Welles, before Morocco even gained independence as a country.

The delay in participation in most Arab countries was affected by the extent of the development of the industry, because participation basically expresses a desire to search for foreign markets for national films, but political influences were present in countries such as Iraq that did not participate until after the American occupation, as well as Syria, which registered its presence in honor of During the United Arab Republic, which was represented by Egyptian films, and after the secession, Syria was in constant hostility with America. Then, its first participation was recorded, against the will of the Syrian government, through the film "Little Gandhi", which documented the facts of torture and killing of the Syrian dissident Ghiath Matar during the revolution.

There is another case of mixing genealogies related to the film "3000 Nights" by the Palestinian director Mai Al-Masry, a film that tells the story of a Palestinian prisoner in a prison of the Israeli occupation, but he represented Jordan in 2017 as it was funded through the "Jordanian Royal Film Commission", and because the Palestinian Ministry of Culture chose in The same year, "Ya Tayer Al Tayer", directed by Hani Abu Asaad.

The first Palestinian registration was in 2003 with the film "A Divine Hand" by Elia Suleiman, but the executive management of the Academy refused to nominate it [3] for not recognizing Palestine as a member state of the United Nations, which contradicts other cases in which films from countries outside the United Nations such as Hong were accepted. Kong, Puerto Rico and Taiwan, so that the Academy adheres to other conditions related to the formation of the Governmental Committee for Film Selection.

It was clear that the matter was driven by the Israeli lobbies, and with the film "Paradise Now", the Academy tried to register it in the name of "the Palestinian Authority" and then "the Palestinian territories", but this did not prevent the film from reaching the final nominations.

One of the strangest obstacles that films face is the lack of familiarity with the rules of the academy known for decades.

For example, Egypt lost the recording of its film in 2013 after it sent the film "Cairo time" after the official date available for recording films, which is a fixed date for many years at the end of September.

Tunisia almost lost an opportunity similar to its insistence on recording the movie "Zahrat Halab" despite not being shown commercially [4] until the end of September 2016, and then realized in recent days with the recording of "Ali Hilat Aini" by director Leila Bouzid.

The struggles of critics and bureaucrats during the selection of films present a paragraph of national entertainment in an Arab country.

At the end of September 2014, the Egyptian Selection Committee discovered that it had neglected to watch two films [5] that were worthy of consideration. After the filmmakers objected, the committee viewed the two films and then adopted its original decision to choose the film "Factory Girl" by Muhammad Khan.

In 2017, Moroccan media figures [6] questioned the decision of a committee affiliated with the Moroccan Film Center to choose the film "Ghazia" by Nabil Ayouch, as the film was not shown in Morocco commercially [7], which bears the suspicion of favoritism for the director whose film "Oh God’s horses" represented Morocco for the year 2014.

But government interventions against films and filmmakers were always the most dangerous.

Despite the scarcity of Jordanian films produced annually, the Royal Commission ignored the recording of the film "God has benefited" by director Mahmoud Al-Massad, despite its financial support, and he was banned from commercial exposure [8] during 2017 on the justification of offending the prestige of the state after a special presentation attended by Princess Reem Ali.

The same thing happened to the film “The Last Days of the City,” directed by Tamer Al-Saeed, whose censorship was suspended to allow it to be shown throughout 2017. He was also excluded from participating [9] in the Cairo Festival with flimsy justifications, and he was also banned from limited cultural shows.

The opposite is what happened to the Algerian film "Babecha" by director Mounia Meddour, who represented his country in the Oscars [10] despite its local banning in 2019, and before that it achieved good revenues when it was shown in France.

Despite the selection of "Case No. 23" to represent Lebanon in the 2018 award, its director [11] Ziad Doueiri was suspended for a complaint against him for filming his film "Shock" in Israel 6 years ago, and later "The Case" reached the list of final nominations.

During 2019, signals were issued from 6 Arab countries [12] regarding their intention to record films from them for the first time with the award, and the year passed without the Academy’s records bearing any mark from these countries.

The academy did not accept the registration of the films “Ikasha” (Sudan), “Fields of Freedom” (Libya), “Jihad in Hollywood” (Qatar), “Rashid and Rajab” (UAE), “Ziana” (Oman), and “Tarbal Rayeh Jay” (Bahrain), and did not even announce its rejection of these films, indicating that some of them did not go beyond the stage of enthusiastic statements.

Two of these films (Libya and Qatar) were documentaries with a political tone higher than their techniques. The rules of the Academy do not refuse to register documentaries, but in any case there was no point in registering these films other than placing the two countries' marks in the Oscars.

The other two were normal or poor commercial films (UAE and Bahrain). The Sudanese film was the only one that received a respectable festival tour.

Previously, the UAE tried to record its first film in 2017 [13], and indeed it had 3 films with good and medium production, one of whom won a tour of film festivals, which is "Men Only at Burial" by director Abdullah Al Kaabi, but the selection committee of the Dubai Film Festival faced several problems. The first is that the Emirati component of the film is limited to the nationality of the director and his funding, while the story and the actors are from Iraq, with more than one symbolic presence of Iranian technicians.

The year passed in silence, and later the Dubai Festival itself was postponed and then permanently canceled.

The crises of the emerging industry are not inevitable, as Saudi Arabia began recording its first films for the 2014 edition before its decision to allow public cinematography, and Yemen recorded two films and it is already embroiled in a devastating civil war.

It is not possible to simply recognize the great Arab zero in the Oscars, because Arabs and their films have reached the stage many times to win and be nominated through other direct methods that do not go through the difficulties of local registration for the award for best foreign language film.

At the 2017 awards ceremony, "The White Helmets" won the award for the best short documentary film. The film carried the Syrian nationality due to its theme dealing with civil rescue groups in Syrian cities during the revolution. The Syrian government did not present the two documentaries "The Last Men in Aleppo" and "On Fathers and Sons" The two finalists were nominated in 2018 and 2019.

Also, the documentary "Al-Midan" was not expected to pass from the Egyptian government committees, because of its subject matter about figures belonging to the revolution, and its director, Jehan Njeim, preferred to present a film directly to the Academy in the documentary category.

The common factor in all of these films is that their makers reside abroad and can record their films according to their international producers.

As for the Jordanian short film "Baheya and Mahmoud", it qualified for the short film award after its participation in the Palm Springs festival, which is undertaking the pre-qualification task with other festivals.

After the academy announces the acceptance of registering a film for the Best International Film Award, a specialized committee / committees prepares a short list of the best films. Each member of the committees selects his films secretly, so that the short list will be announced and voted on again by 30 members (including 10 members from New York, in addition to any A member wishes to participate) to choose 5 films for the final nominations, then after this, members of the Academy participate in the secret vote to choose the best film, on the condition that they attend screenings of the nominated films.

The larger the voting, the greater the voting bias, but the composition of the memberships carries an inherent bias.

Each member of the Academy belongs to one of 17 professional departments, and each of these departments must select only 5 candidates in each professional category for which prizes are presented on the final night (except for the best film category, nominations are from 5 to 10 films), for example the directing department chooses Directors, and the acting department nominates actors. Then, on the night of awarding the awards, all departments share a choice of work or one person winning each category [14].

Arab filmmakers benefited from the rules of diversity that began after the 2015 awards edition, when white actors won the 20 nominations available in the acting category, and the #OscarsSoWhite campaign was launched to criticize the way Oscars nominations work with bias in favor of the majority of its members.

2013 Academy Awards #OscarsSoWhite pic.twitter.com/WOV9rnvFNJ

- Oscars So White (@OscarSoWhite) January 16, 2015

In the following years, the Academy worked to increase and diversify its membership, the number of members increased by 35% between 2015-2018, and the increase in representation of previously underrepresented groups was taken into account.

In 2020, the Academy invited 819 people to join its membership [15], of whom 45% are women, 36% are from ethnic minorities in America, and 49% of them are non-Americans and belong to 68 countries.

The number of Arabs joining the academy has doubled annually, from only one or two joiners in the previous four years to 6 new entrants in 2016 [16], then 12 joiners in 2019, among whom was the Syrian director Talal Derki, who won the Oscar nomination in 2019 (on the authority of Fathers and Sons) And the Egyptian-born actor Rami Malek who became the first Arab to win an Oscar for his role in "Bohemian Rhapsody".

This was the entry point for dozens of Arab filmmakers to join the Academy, and perhaps their number currently reaches 40 members, which is a very marginal percentage among the Academy’s members, who number more than 10,000 members.

Rami Malek and Talal Derki

So the traditional prejudice is inevitable now, and the Arabs cannot take sides.

Two ways remain to raise the fortunes of films, the first of which is advertising and marketing campaigns during the short list stage and beyond, and this requires that the rights to display and distribute the film globally in the hands of a large company, and this was recently available for the Jordanian films "Theeb" and the Lebanese "Kafr Nahum" during their final nominations Which brings us to the last method, and it is the first in fact, because it is related to the choice of films.

Most Arab film selection committees have an idea that the film should express the peculiarity of the local culture, or carry an urgent statement about a certain political position.

In fact, cultural specificity represents a psychological barrier for the Oscars mini-committees, which are predominantly watched and rushed, and it is not a condition that their members are aware of politics outside their countries, but may not even know the locations of film countries, and that is why Arab films rarely reach short lists, and they fall out. Arab choices are in front of a simple and obvious condition for any film: that it be integrated in aspects of its making, and that it tells a brilliantly attractive story.

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