The following are excerpts from an article that appears on the National Public Radio Web site:
“British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla jokingly calls his recent films — about Sept. 11, Afghanistan and Iraq — his ‘war on terror’ trilogy. Abdalla played a hijacker in United 93, an Afghan immigrant in The Kite Runner, and now, a conflicted Iraqi in Green Zone.
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“But for his next project, the 30-year-old star is turning away from Hollywood and using the foothold he’s gained in the West to help produce and star in his first independent Arab film.
“‘The failure of people to be able to understand things to do with the Middle East is in some ways a failure of the arts world,’ he says.
“So he’s decided to guide his career to change that.
“Abdalla’s latest project is called In the Last Days of the City, and it sets out to capture the spirit of bohemian Cairo, Beirut, and Baghdad through the stories of a generation of young people trying to find their voice under the weight of authoritarian governments and the rise of religious fundamentalism.
“Abdalla says it’s pretty hard to jump into a taxi or walk down a Cairo street without thinking: ‘I wish I had a camera with me.’ The film would be shot on the streets of the city by a crew drawn from Lebanon, Iraq, and Britain.
“In order to tell the story on their own terms, Abdalla and director Tamer El-Said had to raise funds for the project and work outside the Egyptian studio system.
“Mainstream Arab cinema is a bit like Bollywood, Abdalla explains, featuring slapstick comedy and melodramatic sequences that often fail to mirror the struggles of daily life in a complex city like Cairo.”
Find the full story here.
Murphy can be reached at: [email protected]
