Interview with Ibrahim El Batout about “Hawi”
Jul 06, 2011
ahram online
Hawi (magician), a film for which director Ibrahim El Batout won the award for best Arab film in the Doha Tribeca Film Festival, follows the same style of his previous feature films Ithaki and Ein Shams.
The movie relays several interrelated stories and spreads them out in separate compact moments. The link between all the fragments is a bleak, yet calm mood, due mainly to its location in the city of Alexandria.
The characters cross paths, but are all drawn in their own world and misery. Something about the anguish of each character is similar, stemming from the same origin. It is the agony of loneliness and detachment, which is reflected in the film’s pacing and camera work.
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There is Youssef, who is released from a five-year solitary imprisonment at the beginning of the film and asked by an authoritative voice to retrieve some documents in ten days. What kind of documents remains a mystery throughout the whole film, perhaps one weakness of the film.
There is a great deal of mystery in the lives of Batout’s characters and a general sense of ambiguity in the film.