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ex-Mufti calls for gay film ban |
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Written by Andrew Shaw
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Monday, 04 August 2008 |
An Egyptian film society has responded with “deep sorrow” to calls from the ex-Mufti of Egypt to destroy a film about a gay man.
All My Life (Toul Omri) tells the story of Rami, whose male lover marries and leaves him to face alone the realities of being gay in Egypt.
The film is set against the backdrop of the Queen Boat arrests in 2001, where 52 men were arrested on a floating gay nightclub. Twenty-one men were handed three-year jail sentences.
All My Life, the first production from the Egyptian Underground
Film Society (EUFS), premiered at the San Francisco International LGBT
Film Festival on June 22.
Commenting on the ex-Mufti’s call to burn copies of the film, director Maher Sabry said: “I’m not surprised that this happened. It was expected, yet it’s still painful to me, because it’s an indication of just how backward we’ve become.
“We’re now living in an age of cultural regression, an age where dissidents, presidential candidates and religious minorities are thrown into jail.
“We claim to be emulating Islamic civilisation, but if the people who built that civilisation were alive today, there would have been fatwas pronounced against them and their books and other works would have been burned.”
Dr Zein el Abedeen, Egypt’s Anti-AIDS Program director added his condemnation, saying the film was “a painful blow to all our efforts to combat the spread of HIV”.
A EUFS spokesperson said the situation in Egypt is reminiscent of the Reagan era in the United States, “when the real reason for the HIV/AIDS virus was kept a secret while the press falsely claimed it was a ‘gay disease’".
“[This] led to a catastrophic spread of infection. Unfortunately, it seems inevitable that our current state of denial and secrecy, in addition to the refusal to enter into any public discussion of sensitive and immediately relevant issues, will lead to negative consequences.”
EUFS was founded in 2005 by a group of artists and intellectuals seeking a creative outlet away from the restrictions of censorship and conservative production values.
Learn more about the film and the EUFS here Trailer here
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