Scent of Revolution - Ra'ihat Al-Thawra - Ideas

About this IDEA

Documentary HD 70 min.

What if you witness a revolution but things get worse? What if your homeland is in ruins and you cannot help it?

How do you cope?

You can lament your loss, get sick and depressed, or you may escape into your memories and dreams constructing a parallel universe. Yet, there is still this scent of revolution in the air…

Four people, four stories…

A Coptic political activist and an Upper Egyptian collector reconstruct the story of their hometown Luxor that was demolished due to state corruption; in Cairo a socialist writer compares the 1952 and the January 2011 revolution, reflects on his own political disillusionment by telling about one of his most beautiful novellas written at the beginning of the Mubarak era; a female cyber space designer constructs an avatar for a secluded Salafi woman and invites her to visit the virtual Tahrir Square she has designed… Lingering between past and present these different stories represent collective grief work about an incomplete revolution and a country in ruins. Its four protagonists are caught in different phases of grieving, namely, anger, depression, regression and adaptation, and display therefore different strategies in dealing with their bereavement face to the country’s situation.

Why is this idea important?

If you want to know more about the before and after of the Egyptian revolution, if you share my sadness about the course of the events, if you want to know how others deal with the devastating legacy of dictatorship you may want to help to get this film completed.

More about this idea

For me this documentary is an attempt to deal with my own sadness. During the revolution I was unable to take up a camera and shoot as the events seemed simply too powerful to fit onto a screen. 15 months later and after counter revolution has been winning ground by the day I felt the need for reassessment and the urge to deal with spreading disillusionment.

The words of the novelist, Alaa El-Dib will punctuate the flow of the film. For his novella Lemon Blossoms (1987) has become the film’s major source of inspiration. Its story line follows a depressive former revolutionary on a one day trip back into the places of his past, a movement that my film readapts through its different characters and shifting locations following one of the novellas main questions about what has become of home and homeland after they have been betrayed by its elites.

For, lemon blossoms are known for their very intense and beautiful scent, but also for their fragility: the moment they fall to the ground they crumble and turn ugly. In the novella they stand for the main character’s failure to connect past and present and make use of both for a better future. The film, however, will investigate if our memory and our imagination can still reactivate and preserve some of that fragrance, that scent of revolution!

What is the funding for?

This project is totally independent and has not received any funding so far. It has a very devoted crew though that agreed to work either for free or for very little money. The money will be used for the editing and sound mix and either to pay or improve the wages of crew members (except for the director of course) in order to prevent them from exploiting themselves too much for the sake of the project and their friendship to the filmmaker.

About Viola Shafik

Viola Shafik is an independent German-Egyptian filmmaker, film scholar and film curator based in Cairo and Berlin. She is the author of Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (AUC Press, 2007) and director of several documentaries. Her most recent feature documentary My Name is not Ali/Jannat Ali (2011) is still touring on festivals.