Finding Common Cause (and Rhythms) in Sherief Elkatsha’s Music Documentary ‘Far From the Nile’
Finding common cause and rhythm across language and culture is at the heart of “Far From the Nile,” from director Sherief Elkatsha, which opened the Horizons of Arab Cinema competition at the Cairo Intl. Film Festival.
Elkatsha’s latest follows 12 African musicians from seven countries along the Nile River who comprise the Nile Project, a group that seeks to highlight the conflict over increasingly scarce water resources in the region. As they leave their home countries for a 100-day tour of the American heartland, they grapple with cultural differences, musical disputes and competing egos in an effort to stay united behind their common cause.
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It’s a timely film from the U.S. born, Cairo-raised director, which highlights the often humorous attempts by the musicians to resolve their differences while being introduced to each other, and the U.S., and dealing with the demands of a four-month tour.
Elkatsha admitted it wasn’t easy. “Being on tour is like going to war together,” he said this week at the Cairo Film Festival, where he sipped coffee and spoke with Variety on the shores of the Nile. “What’s so interesting to me about the group is this idea of coming together, and your differences making you a stronger unit,” he added. “I fell in love with all those characters.”
The director, who’s close with the brother of the Nile Project’s CEO, Mina Girgis, said he “knew nothing about” the group when he volunteered several years ago to join them for a photo shoot in Aswan, an ancient city on the banks of the Nile River in southern Egypt.
“Upon being introduced to them, I was completely blown away,” he said. “I was blown away by the people, and I was blown away by the mission statement of the Nile Project, and I was certainly blown away by the music.”
Several months later, Elkatsha got a call from Girgis about an ambitious, four-month tour that the African musicians had planned for the U.S. The filmmaker came on board to document the trip, not recognizing — on the eve of the 2016 presidential elections — how much the country was about to change.
The group arrived just two days before President Trump, following on the heels of his notorious comment about “shithole” African countries, introduced a ban on refugees and travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations. “With all of these African musicians and their visa complications, we would have never gotten in,” Elkatsha said. The Nile Project’s U.S. tour kicked off with literal hours to spare.
Against the backdrop of U.S. politics and the increasingly contentious debate over “migrant caravans” and immigration policy, the director admitted that he expected the fraught American political climate to play a large role in his documentary, which is produced by the U.S.-based non-profit the american vicarious.
But the film began to evolve once he began the lengthy process of editing nearly 500 hours of footage. On one hand, Elkatsha said he “didn’t want to give [Trump] any more coverage than he already had.” On the other, “as you get deeper into the story you realize this isn’t the story I want to tell, and I don’t really care about that, and I don’t think anyone will care about that,” he said. “Once you mention Trump, it somehow dates it. In my mind, this is a story that’s in our future.”
Born in Los Angeles to Egyptian immigrant parents, Elkatsha was raised in Cairo, where his family moved when he was six years old, and returned to the U.S. to study at Boston University. He has called New York home for the past 26 years, although family, personal ties and his interests as a filmmaker have seen him return to Egypt often.
“Far From the Nile” is the director’s first feature since 2013’s “Cairo Drive,” his lively portrait of the Egyptian capital as seen through the mayhem of its roads that won several awards, including best Arab documentary at Abu Dhabi and the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC. Set over the course of three years that fortuitously bookended Egypt’s 2011 revolution, the film was praised by Variety for “cleverly using the nightmarish traffic conditions to make broader statements on the zeitgeist of the nation.”
The director is currently in the process of relocating to Cairo, which has been the source of so much of his cinematic work. Along with “Cairo Drive,” Elkatsha co-directed “Egypt: We Are Watching You” alongside Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Jehane Noujaim (“The Square”) and lensed “Cairo Garbage,” from director Mikala Krogh. “For all its frustrations, there’s something that Egypt and Cairo offer me that nowhere in the world can offer me,” he said. “Egypt is ripe with stories.”
The Cairo premiere of “Far From the Nile” was the first time that most of the film’s protagonists saw themselves on the big screen. It was, Elkatsha admitted, jarring for some, although the premiere — and the movie’s warm reception — seemed to underscore the message at its heart.
“They loved it. They’re so proud. It’s exactly what I hoped for, which is something that would make them proud and give them a special feeling about it,” he said. “Last night over beers, all of them said, ‘I wish we could go back on tour. And if we did, we’d do it differently. What were we fighting about? Why were we so miserable? We had it made.’”
The Cairo Intl. Film Festival runs Nov. 13 – 22.
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