The Temptation of Specters Films and Festivals

Author's name: Saad Al-Qurashi

The book "The Temptation of Specters... Films and Festivals" by Egyptian writer and novelist Saad Al-Qarsh was recently published by Dar Safsafa in Cairo (2025). In his introduction, he states: Humanity has shaped the features of the arts: architecture, music, painting, sculpture, poetry, and dance. Instead of stability and reassurance, the storm of cinema has blown, the staff of Moses, an art that "gleans" the fruits of previous arts and adds to them. The seventh art maintains for itself a name that is difficult to translate into other languages. Cinema has remained "cinema," a single word that has entered almost all languages ​​and has become established as "cinema."

Cinema has opened doors to worlds without borders for me since childhood, added years to my life, and revealed some secrets to me. I saw my name and lineage in a family tree whose members increase with every film worth watching, and it has continued to enrich my soul... a maze that rivals "One Thousand and One Nights" in imagination and enjoyment, ever since I watched "A Woman Without Chains" in 1980. It suited my longings and curiosity to discover this magic. Then I read Naguib Mahfouz's novel "The Road" and saw two realistic cinematic adaptations that were below the philosophical level of the novel. Naguib Mahfouz defeated both Hossam El-Din Mostafa, the director of "The Road," and Ashraf Fahmy, the director of "The Stigma of Shame." After reading the novel "The Postman Knocks Twice" as a young man, I exonerated Naguib Mahfouz from borrowing the spirit of James Cain's novel. But my Palestinian friend Ahmed Omar Shahin, the novel's translator, reinforced my doubts.

The boy, who responded to the call of cinema, saw the world through the eyes of directors and discovered that all creativity leads to cinema, and that every creative person has a share in cinema, regardless of the art they excel in. He was drawn to masters of imagination. He would meet Yahya Haqqi, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef Idris, Adonis, Saadi Youssef, Mahmoud Darwish, Tayeb Salih, El Hadi Adam, Kamal El Sheikh, Salah Abu Seif, and Youssef Chahine, and would attend a crowded meeting of Martin Scorsese at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. He would discover something strange: How could he have missed being photographed with any of them? Except for Naguib Mahfouz; the spotlight confuses him, he suffers from microphone phobia, and he envies brave people who waste their lives addicted to the camera.

The boy who was enchanted by movies acknowledged this chosen captivity and did not wish to be cured. If he was forced to watch on a familiar screen, not a movie screen, he prepared in accordance with the efforts of the filmmakers. He did not make a profession of it, but rather prepared something resembling seclusion, and usually began watching after midnight, not caring when it ended. It happened, in the days of videotape, that he watched *Madison Bridges* and could not get enough of Meryl Streep’s ghost. So he turned on a film he was watching for the first time, titled *Falling in Love*. He chose the second film in Meryl’s honor, and the film rewarded him with the presence of Robert De Niro. The sun had risen, and he could not sleep after a heavy dose, so he began a new day with full energy. Every night there was seclusion, or companionship, with a film.

The boy who sneaked into the cinema alone in the summer of 1980. He didn't come out. He left the darkness of the hall for the Eid sun, and from the opposite sidewalk, he contemplated the cinema facade and the crowds entering the next show. He wished to go back and watch it again, but the money wasn't enough. He was no longer the same person he had been before the adventure, and the ghost had settled in his subconscious, and he responded to the "caller."

I emerged from the darkness into the light of Eid, having seized my right to experience. I never imagined that this magic would be a carpet carrying me, transporting me behind it to distant lands, from India to Holland.

In cinema, I find myself, and it is certain to me that it is the most beautiful "truth" that mankind discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. I cannot imagine the twentieth century and beyond without cinema, the most wonderful imagination created by mankind and which we believed. There is an unwritten contract between the viewer and the filmmakers. What we watch is pure imagination, magic created by a writer, director, actors, editor, set designer and musician. The mastery of imagination to the point of spontaneity makes it more real, more truthful and more beautiful than any truth it expresses. The film suggests that it is reality, it is "the truth."