Living Between Worlds: Alia Ayman On Cairo, New York & A Film Called ‘Catharsis’.

“I loved New York,” Alia Ayman opines over the phone. “It was so interesting being in a place where there is no dominant race, look, or way. As a stranger, one can easily find their place — not because New York is something, but because it is nothing.”

Now returned to her native Cairo after a stint at an NYU course, Alia has learnt a lot about not only what it takes to be a film-maker on a technical level, but about her own motivations about doing it. One of them came from a creative urge that she felt when she was younger.

“I’ve wanted to write since I was a kid, but halfway through University I was unsure if I should write in English or Arabic, so I just stopped until I could figure out where my voice was.”

She found that voice she was looking for in the comfort of film-making.

“Film combines visuals which are a universal language, it’s something quite eclectic. I always think of it as one among many mediums which I can use to express myself, but I still appreciate poetry and literature.”

Being caught in the middle of two cultures, an insolvable problem, frames the argument of her much-lauded film “Catharsis”, and it’s one she feels she is only now coming to terms with.

Nowhere was this more apparent to her than when she came up with the concept. She was having her hair cut in New York, and putting off telling her (more conservative) mother — when she realized that, hundreds of miles from home, she was engaging in a minor form of protest.

“I was freeing myself from something, I wanted to take it to another level. The very stupid act of cutting my hair was liberating. Then, I wanted to push that aspect.”

New York, being a cultural melting pot, and one of the biggest cities in the world, provided her with a platform for her art, but it wasn’t until she took her finished film back home to Cairo that it took off.

She recalls one friend found a different message in “Catharsis” — one of following your dreams, “I think people who saw it saw whatever they wanted to see,” she notes”. This fact might be a testament to its success. While on the surface it plays as a story of a girl working out her place in-between worlds, the apparently universal themes made it award-winning. Even her mother, the source of the anxiety that sparked the idea, liked it a lot.

But now, she’s focusing on what it means to be a film-maker, and that includes supporting others like her. Stepped back a little from directing, she helped a friend set up Cairo’s first Art House Cinema.

“One of the things we’re trying to do is break the monopoly in the film scene of Hollywood blockbusters, or mainstream Egyptian films. We’re focusing on films from the Arab world, so we’ve been screening Lebanese, Jordanian, Palestinian work — it’s very rare to do that here.”

Despite the hegemony of American culture in the way she and her peers have been brought up, there is no lack of enthusiasm for the Arabic language, and Arabic forms of expression within creative endeavours in Egypt — at least not as she sees it.

While the film deals with her burgeoning questions such as, “why is it cool to speak in English, why am I more at home in New York than Cairo”, she feels that these issues are limited to only the relatively few:

“The issue with language and culture is largely when people who have been educated in private schools and American Unversities come back [to the Middle East]. We have been brought up in this hybrid mode.”

In her mind, the problem is localised, and Arab creativity, in Arabic, continues with much aplomb “The ratio is fine,” she assured me. “It’s only a problem that only exists among a class. We have a strong dual local and Arabised structure, that has not been tainted by globalisation yet.”

Now an award-winner, one might ask when we can expect her next offering. But film-making is as much a passion as it is a side-show that completes a more-rounded picture of her. It is an extension of her as much as an outlet, so she puts as much thought into her wider experience as well.

“If I have the potential to make it as a filmmaker, I need to be equipped,” she says. “I need to read more, I need to know more. I want to live in the middle of academia, writing, and making films.”

Outside experience sharpens her to the issues that she is passionate about — rather than being a professional film-maker, she is happy to be a person who makes films.

“If I can live within these worlds, I won’t be confined.”

Article by Chris Yeoh.