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Canadian film ‘Cairo Time’ serene in front of the cameras, chaotic behind them – Metro US

Canadian film ‘Cairo Time’ serene in front of the cameras, chaotic behind them

TORONTO – It’s tough to believe when watching director Ruba Nadda’s tranquil love story “Cairo Time,” but behind the stolen glances and loaded silences shared by co-stars Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig, utter chaos was raging.

Shooting in the sweltering Egyptian capital, the Canadian production was threatened by hostile police, relentless government censorship and even an overzealous stunt motorcycle driver who very nearly plowed into Clarkson.

“In front of the camera, it was all serene, and behind us, everything was kicking off: mules were getting run over, police were arresting people, other people were trying to see what was going on,” Siddig told The Canadian Press in a recent interview.

“It was like stampedes and crushes and impromptu rallies. It was one of the wildest experiences I’ve ever had.”

And yet, the finished product belies no trace of the behind-the-scenes bedlam.

Clarkson plays Juliette Grant, a magazine editor who travels from Canada to Cairo for a vacation with her United Nations official husband, Mark (Tom McCamus).

When Mark is unable to drag himself away from his work at a Gaza refugee camp, he sends an old friend and former colleague, Tareq (Siddig), to keep Grant company and stand in as her Cairo tour guide.

Slowly, a romance blossoms as Tareq whisks Juliette through some of the bustling city’s landmarks: they take a boatride on the shimmering Nile and visit a hookah bar, a tightly packed market and, eventually, the Pyramids.

“I just wanted to make a movie that was classic, and that was about two people falling in love but it’s also fleeting, and it happens over the course of two weeks,” said Nadda, who also wrote the film.

The film captured the imaginations of audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, nabbing the audience award for best Canadian feature.

Nadda says it was important that the affair between Siddig and Clarkson remain non-physical. The Cairo time of the title refers to the more stately pace of life in the Middle East, where Tareq lives free of the instant gratification that Nadda says characterizes North American life.

But given the lack of physical contact between the film’s leads and relatively sparse dialogue, Nadda needed actors who could convey a depth of emotion without touching or speaking much.

She thinks she found them.

“I’m so lucky,” the Toronto director said. “The script was very subtle, and not driven by plot. … I basically tell Patty this all the time: ‘I needed an actress and a half, and I got you.”‘

The admiration was mutual.

“Actors, we’re hookers,” Clarkson told The Canadian Press. “We want the big thrills, we want the immediate gratification and the bells and whistles in the part – the big dramatic scenes – and there’s none of that (in ‘Cairo Time’).

“So I did have to do a really deep, internal soul-searching for this part. But I did have Ruba, who is such an exquisite director. She’s a beautiful woman, and she just happens to be exceptionally talented.

“It was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had and I’ve shot a million movies.”

Of course, the actors had help from their gorgeous environment. The film’s Cairo jumps off the screen, a pulsing, gritty, vivacious metropolis.

“It’s a city that has aching poverty and breathtaking beauty and it’s an assault on you,” Clarkson said. “And you have to do things the Cairo way. You just do. And we learned that very well.”

Indeed, Cairo certainly imposed its will on the 25-day shoot.

Aside from the stifling heat (Nadda says the cast got used to 50C weather), the crew was also saddled with a “censorship minder,” sent by the Egyptian government to monitor the way Nadda portrayed Cairo. The government representative was to stay on set at all times and sign off on any reels the crew wanted to send back to Canada.

“It’s a nightmare – Cairo is like bureaucracy hell,” said Nadda, who has made 18 films over the last dozen years. “This censorship woman … was always like: ‘Those children look too poor, don’t film them.’

“So I had to lose her a lot.”

Nadda and her crew made a habit of sneaking out on their days off to film any of the material they needed that was forbidden by the Egyptian government.

But one day, Nadda says they were shooting in an old Islamic part of town. She cast her lens on a group of old women who had consented to being photographed. But some older men nearby “were not all that happy” that Nadda and her crew were filming the women, and got the police involved.

Since Nadda didn’t have a permit or government official present, she was in trouble.

“Usually, I could break out into my Arabic and talk our way out of it, but they were like: ‘No, we’re confiscating your footage and we’re going to arrest you,”‘ Nadda recalled.

“I didn’t want to go to jail for the night, and I didn’t want my crew to go to jail.”

So she improvised.

“My DP (director of photography) is this tall, blond, blue-eyed man, so I just turned to the police officer and said: ‘See that man? He’s really important. You don’t want him to get you in trouble. It’s really not worth your while to arrest us.’ And he believed me.”

The 36-year-old Nadda is a Canadian with a Palestinian mother and Syrian father. She spent some of her formative years living in Damascus, Syria, and first became interested in Cairo after taking a vacation there at 16 years old.

Because of her experience living in the Middle East, she says she was cognizant of the type of challenges she would face in making “Cairo Time.”

She just didn’t tell anyone else.

“I’m an Arab, so I knew, but I needed to get everybody and the financiers to Cairo,” she said. “I just knew that if I told everybody all the problems we were going to have, I’d never be allowed to shoot there.”

Of course, there was one near-disaster that Nadda couldn’t have anticipated.

During one scene, Siddig escorts Clarkson through a busy downtown area as passersby swivel their heads to catch a glimpse of Clarkson, whose long blond locks qualify her as exotic in Egypt (in fact, Clarkson admits that she got used to drawing the attention of male suitors on the street even when they weren’t filming – “I started to wear long skirts eventually,” she says with a laugh).

The script called then for a motorcyclist to interrupt the scene by whizzing by Clarkson. Problem was, the driver got a little closer than he was supposed to and very nearly rammed into the actress.

“That motorcycle really almost hit me,” Clarkson said. “Alexander grabbed me so hard I thought my ribs had shifted, permanently. But he did really save me, and it’s on film.

“It was kind of great. We caught it, and I lived.”

Did she have any words for the reckless stunt driver?

“No,” she said. “‘Cause we got the shot. We all just went home and had a drink.”

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