A portrayal of the lives of four friends who have different dreams and aspirations; Ahmed falls in love with a girl he saw once, Sayed gets in trouble when he sells the laboratory animals, Abbas who is married to a woman that doesn’t love him, and Ali who works in illegal operations.

kanafani@letterboxd wrote:
Depictions of the popular “hara”, or alley, have a long tradition in Egyptian literature and cinema, from the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, to the movies of Salah Abou Seif: self-contained, underprivileged neighborhoods in overpopulated cities, almost cut off from the outside world, teaming with characters and stories representing a cross-section of the Egyptian urban poor.

This movie is a distinguished entry in this genre. It achieves a novelistic density that is reminiscent of the stories of Ibrahim Aslan and other modernist writers (director Radwan El-Kashef fittingly opens the movie with a dedication to “the generation of Egyptian writers of the sixties”). It centers on the friendship of three men: Abbas, a hoodlum with a heart of gold, living on the edge of legality; Sayed, a sexually repressed animal lab technician who sells test rabbits to butchers for extra income; and Ahmad (Farouk El Feshawi in a seminal role), a man nearing an impasse, longing to escape the narrow confines of the neighborhood, awaiting the return of the semi-mythical figure of Ali Bobby, a childhood friend who left the alley to pursue a life of high-stakes crime. The three men moonlight as wedding entertainers, which is the conduit to several mirthful explosions of song and dance throughout the movie, painfully contrasting with their daily struggles.

There is a host of other memorable characters: An unemployed, blind man who still dreams of making it big as a singer; an alcoholic wagon worker whose sons keep dying one by one; a young girl who has the misfortune of falling in love with the emotionally stunted Ahmad…

The movie is very funny, and is quite radical in its usage of colorful, popular dialect, which sometimes sounds like a foreign language only spoken in this neighborhood. But there is an unbelievable sense of sadness and grief at its heart, something I’ve rarely experienced: the pain of lost dreams and wrecked friendships, the sorrow of a humanity trapped in an unforgiving world, but still finding a way to pluck moments of triumph along the way. The final scene, where the three friends gather in the desert for one more performance, this time with no audience, just wrecked me.

Why.Violet.1993.WEB-DL.720p.x264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 57 min
Size: 	1.20 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1280x720 ~> 1332x720
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 386 kb/s
BPP: 	0.060
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 83.9 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/AE81B396DE265DD/Why.Violet.1993.WEB-DL.720p.x264.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/37EB69577168327/WhyViolet.srt

Language(s):Arabic
Subtitles:English

The post Radwan El-Kashef – Lieah ya banafsieg AKA Violets Are Blue AKA Why, Violets? (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
This Egyptian feature film has strong elements of both folktale and comedy, although its subject matter and final scenes are anything but funny. Set in southern Egypt, the film tells the story of a group of people who are led into the desert by a strong-minded man who wants them to live far from the greed and corruption of civilized society. Years later, when the leader has become old and weak, a mysterious visitor coaxes the men of the village away to work in the north where they can make a lot of money. Only the leader and his adolescent grandson Ahmed – who has no desire for wealth – are left in the village with the women and children.
Ahmed’s only desire is to learn to climb the highest tree in the village to harvest the rare white dates, whose wine he believes will return his grandfather’s health. Being the only healthy man in the village, however, Ahmed finds himself laden with responsibility – he soon handles the mail, reads and writes letters for the women, looks after the children, defends the women’s honor, runs errands to nearby villages, becomes engaged to local beauty Salma, and generally grows up. He also becomes an initiate into the female side of life in the village. He eventually climbs the palm tree, though the resulting wine doesn’t have quite the effect he wants it to have.

When a few of the men return home, they find that Ahmed seems to have become an important part of every household. Jealous, they plot his death, sending him up the highest palm tree and then cutting it down. Once the tree has been felled, the shade-dwelling villagers find that the sun is too brutal for them and they move back to civilization. The village becomes a sun-baked ghost town, inhabited only by the grandfather’s old slave and Salma and Ahmed’s illegitimate daughter.

Date Wine is one of too few films directed by the talented Radwan El-Kashef, who died in 2002. By setting the film in the southern part of Egypt, El-Kashef lets himself step away from realistic narration and create an exotic, mythical, epic story, one that’s brought him both criticism and acclaim. His detractors tend to think Date Wine is too commercial, that its glossy look, exotic locales and costumes, and musical interludes are made to appeal to an international audience and say little about Egypt or Egyptian filmmaking. El-Kashef’s supporters regard the film as a welcome look at the often ignored and much more traditional southern Egyptian culture.

Media librarians and archivists may well want to add this title to their collections as an example of bold, colorful filmmaking from one of Egypt’s best-known modern directors.

1.05GB | 1h 53m | 720×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/ED125F6AC486060/Date_Wine_(1998).mkv

Language:Arabic
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post Radwan El-Kashef – Arak el-balah AKA Date Wine (1998) first appeared on Cinema of the World.