Pirate Cinema Tuesdays

Mosireen, the new independent media collective I'm working with in Cairo, has started regular Tuesday night screenings. Each week we'll show a contemporary short film followed by a feature. The features will be fiction/documentary, old/new, art-house/trashy - we'll see how it goes. We're living in lawless times so we don't have the rights to screen them, but hope the directors and distributors will forgive us. We're not charging anything, just hoping people drop some change in our donations box. 

We started last Tuesday with the pirate premiere of Mostafa Youssef's Blue Dive and then showed Costa-Gavras' Z.

Next Tuesday we're showing Ahmed el Lozy's Night Shift followed by Steve McQueen's Hunger.

Maikel Nabil's ongoing hungerstike is, of course, the reason we want to show this film. But it's not a straightforward decision. Is showing a film that delves deep into the physical pain of hunger striking an action? Can you consider it motivating, mobilising? Or is it cruel and inappropriate? Should we, instead, be outside the psychiatric hospital he's been transferred to? Should we be doing something with our own bodies as well? 

We couldn't come to an answer at first, but as Maikel is now being joined by another 83 prisoners going on hunger strike we decided that making McQueen's film available for the public to see was important. Not only for an emotional understanding of what someone on hunger strike is going through, but also for a politico-historical understanding of how it has been used before, what worked and what didn't. One of the key lessons Bobby Sands and his comrades learned was not to strike together. Once the first person grows seriously weak then his life is in your hands. So they strike one by one, with a week between them. Maikel Nabil has been alone throughout his 68 days - how much longer can he last? A hunger strike is traditionally the recourse of the weaker party in a struggle. Have we accepted that the revolutionaries are now the weaker party in Egypt?

So we'll screen it and discuss all this on Tuesday, 9pm at Mosireen. 

Flat 34, 6th Floor, 19a Adly Street, Downtown, Cairo

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