CAIRO -

The murder of a Mansoura University girl at the hands of a young man who refused to be associated with him has sparked wide reactions on social media, and some have accused Egyptian cinema of encouraging these incidents by presenting many scenes of violence against women.

The reality came to be more cruel and horrific than the imagination of filmmakers in Egypt. Even the scenes of harassment, assault and rape did not end with the scene of the killing of a woman in front of crowds of people. Of course, none of the scriptwriters’ imagination reached the point of slaying a girl in her early twenties in front of the eyes of her colleagues at the entrance to the university.

A number of serious films dealt with women’s issues, beginning with the movie “Marriage” (1933), which presented the issue of forced marriage, in which a girl is forced to marry someone she does not love, and the matter was repeated in the films “Something of Fear” (1969) and “The Second Wife” ( 1967), which are films that won women in the end, and the final immortal scene came in “Something of Fear” expressing the revolution of the masses, in opposition to “Atris’ marriage to Fouada,” even if it included political projections.

Violence against women in comedies in the fifties and sixties did not constitute a major crisis for women. Shadia later takes her right from her husband to return the slap.

"it is a mess"

A love story by a violent, psychopathic maniac presented by director Youssef Chahine in his latest film "Heya Fawda" (2007), with the participation of director Khaled Youssef, and a screenplay by Nasser Abdel Rahman.

In it, we see how intense love and rejection by the lover can turn into devastating violence and rape in the context of a story about police repression and corruption that affected her a few years before the January 2011 revolution.

"If I kill you so that I can live, I will kill you..." says the corrupt police officer Hatem (Khaled Saleh) as he attacks the girl Nour (Mena Shalaby) - whom he loves obsessively, but she refuses - after he kidnapped her and took her to a secluded place, to rape her while imagining that she is She became his wife and bore him a son.

Nour violently resists him and injures him, so he beats her until she loses consciousness, and stands in front of her lifeless body crying bitterly.

The film ends with the revolt of the people of the region against Hatem and his brutality, and Hatem shoots the prosecutor and the fiancé of his "lover" Sharif (Youssef Al-Sharif), then Hatem commits suicide by shooting himself, so that this is the end of the injustice.

"Speak, Scheherazade."

"Ehki Ya Shahrazad" is considered the most direct film of the millennium dealing with issues of violence against women, presented by Yousry Nasrallah, director and Waheed Hamed, author, where Heba Younes (Mona Zaki), the famous TV presenter, faces the pressures of her husband, climber journalist Karim (Hassan Al-Raddad) to stop eating Political issues in its program, to achieve his professional ambitions in the chair of the editor-in-chief.

Heba turns away from politics in her program, to present humane women's stories that reveal the oppression and injustice that women face, in harsh conditions and deep-rooted societal traditions, which anger her husband and severely assaults her.

In the end scene, Heba comes out facing the audience of her television program, and on her face the effects of the beating she received from her husband, and smiles at the camera to start telling her personal story this time, saying, "I am the oppressed, battered guest." their story.

Critic Tariq Al-Shennawi comments - in his article in Rose Al-Youssef magazine - that the scenario of the film is based on the transition from one tale to another, but it combines resistance to injustice and victory for women, such as the character presented by the artist Sawsan Badr, who deals with the issue of marriage in Eastern society, who lived as a virgin because she was not a virgin. She only wants to achieve equality in her relationship with men within the framework of legal marriage.

The world of Waheed Hamid

In his films, the author Waheed Hamid linked the honor of women, society's vision of her, and her revolution against society, its values ​​and traditions. Two friends, as for Ghada, the secretary of the businessman (Yousra) in the movie “Al-Mansi” (1993), she refuses her boss’s order to hand over her body to an influential man, and uses the train transfer worker Youssef Al-Mansi (Adel Imam) to save her and preserve her honor, while the dancer Sonia Selim fights (Nabila Obeid) a fierce battle against the powerful, because they refuse to grant her a license to set up an orphanage in the movie "The Dancer and the Politician" (1990) about the story of Ihsan Abdel Quddus.

Madiha Kamel (left) in the movie "A File in Literature" (communication sites)

Excuse me, law.

While the Egyptian director, Enas El Degheidy, raised the controversy with her first film “Excuse me, law” (1985), the scenario of Ibrahim Al-Mouji, dealing with injustice in the application of laws, inequality between men and women, and how the law differentiates in dealing with men and women when they are in the same situation, by submitting the husband to the misdemeanour court. While the wife is presented to the criminal court, and the lenient sentence is imposed on the husband who kills his unfaithful wife, while the strict sentence applies to the wife who stands in the same position with her husband.

In the movie "Cheap Meat" (1995) from a script by Salah Fouad, Al-Deghaidi deals with the issue of selling minor rural girls to pleasure students from the elderly and adventurous youth of non-Egyptians through various models, and it sparked a great controversy after it was shown in theaters.

Critic Abdel Ghani Daoud sees - in his book "Egyptian Cinema Directors" - that "Al-Deghaidi presents women in her films as a negative being, as a body that excites desires, within the framework of a rich class immersed in wealth separate from its true society and far from our basic and fundamental problems, but it remains (Excuse me, you The Law) is the exceptional film, the most important and most prominent among her other films, such as “Diaries of a Teenager,” “Night Talks” and “The Red Agenda,” all of which dealt with the world of women and their various issues.

Muhammad Khan

The late director Muhammad Khan is also one of the Egyptian directors most interested in monitoring the relationship between a man and a woman, as in his movie "Dinner Date" (1981), where the unhappy wife Nawal (Souad Hosni) asks for a divorce from the authoritarian husband Ezzat (Hussein Fahmy), but Things are developing unimaginably.

The wife presented the husband with poisoned food for dinner and told him, "Neither you nor I deserve to live."

In "The Wife of an Important Man" (1988), Khan presents the psychological and physical violence to which the girl Mona (Mervat Amin) is subjected to her husband, the narcissistic policeman Hisham (Ahmed Zaki), and his cruelty to her increases from one event to another. His home and work, but soon he loses this job and this power, and he goes crazy. The wife tries to escape from his tyranny and turns to her father to protect her, so the officer kills him and commits suicide, in the events of a harsh movie about married life when it turns into hell.

As for his movie "Dreams of Hind and Camelia" (1988), the young widow Hind (Aida Riad) and the divorced Camelia (Najla Fathi) are exposed to a lot of psychological and physical abuse, material and sexual exploitation, and they are also robbed.

In his study, "The Role of Egyptian Cinema in the Spread of Harassment and Violence against Women", researcher Yaqout El-Deeb believes that the movie "Dreams of Hind and Camelia" showed different forms of harassment of women, from poverty and women's having to work in the service of homes, exploitation and violence from an old miser husband, and material exploitation From an unemployed brother addicted to drugs, beatings for money, forced robberies and other issues raised by Khan so boldly.

Movie 678 and harassment

In 2010, director Mohamed Diab discussed in his first film the issue of sexual harassment of women in his movie "678", which bears the number of a public transport bus that becomes the scene of the crime of harassment of one of the heroines of the film. He caught him and brought him to the police to be tried.

The movie "678" presents a solution to confronting harassment, for a woman to avenge herself immediately and injure those who tried to harass her by using a sharp object in a sensitive area. Including her screaming or pleading for help, and she is often the accused, even if she wears the most modest clothes, to face a society that sees women’s clothes as the reason for harassing her?

comedy

On the other hand, some comedy films in the millennium established the concept of the lover’s ownership of his lover, even if she and her family rejected him, as in the movie “Saye’ Bahr” (2004) directed by Ali Ragab and the script of Bilal Fadl, as we see the young Hassan (Ahmed Helmy) going to his fiancée’s house with his friends , to expose her in the street and shout, "Oh immoral, you traitor," and accuse her of treason in a link of ridicule for her and her family.

The pioneers of the communication site shared such scenes after the incident of the Mansoura girl, and how some comedy films entrenched in the minds of this generation the inevitability of the lover’s revenge if his beloved rejected him, whether by exposing her relationship with him or threatening that no one else would approach her, but the imagination of these filmmakers never reached the point of The lover slaughtered his beloved, to be more cruel and violent reality.