The village of Abnoud, 600 kilometers south of Cairo on the Nile, has one attraction: the railway line to Luxor. Every now and then one of the luxury trains that transport the tourists turns up. The children then hang on to the railway barrier and let the wind cool them down a little. “None of these trains ever stop,” says the short film “The Sandwich” by Atteyat Al Abnoudy, one of the most important documentary filmmakers in Egyptian cinema. Abnoud serves as an example to her of the non-simultaneities that characterize her country in its striving for progress, an image of a life that has barely changed for millennia. The flour comes from a hand mill, the fire under the oven is refilled by children's hands, and in a particularly telling scene a boy breaks one of the “sandwiches”,As the distribution title says, a bit ambiguously, he pulls out the soft dough until he only has the promising crust in front of him, and then he milks the milk of a goat directly into the cavity.
Atteyat Al Abnoudy (1939 to 2018) was an extraordinary woman.
She has followed the development of her country with her camera for almost three decades.
Her films have been restored in recent years and are currently being shown online in a retrospective at the Arsenal cinema in Berlin (until June 8).
In these short films you get a picture of a nation that thought it was on the way to the modern age when Atteyat Al Abnoudy started making films around 1970 after studying at the Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema.
At that time Egypt had a rich film production, which supplied the entire Arab region, but it was not every day that a woman switched to documentaries.
In the depths of the land
The interest from which Atteyat Al Abnoudy was guided is particularly evident in “Into the Depth” (1979). Here she goes “into the depths” of her country, on a trip to the Upper Nile, on which all stations are precisely recorded: The Minia region has seven schools in which 2200 children are educated. “Into the Depth” accompanied the work of a Christian school association that was involved in literacy campaigns. The madrasas (today the term is only known for Koran schools) were co-educational, there were hardly any barriers between Christians and Muslims.
Atteyat Al Abnoudy described this everyday life as a challenge for modernization projects in “Rhythm of Life” (1988), one of her main works. The title already refers to a concept of cyclical time, symbolized in the numerous circular movements that shape human craftsmanship: the oil mills, the wells, the clay for brick production, you see animals running in circles again and again, using their strength the traditional cultural techniques are useful. This life has hardly changed since the days of the pharaohs, they say almost with pride. However, children's schooling should change almost everything for the next generation.