Clash

Cairo, 2013. There is a demonstration in the street and the police are making mass arrests. An armoured van fills up. Two journalists are inside first; one carries an American passport and it helps nobody. Then demonstrators close to the Muslim Brotherhood are put in. Then people from the other side. Groups who hate each other are in the same box, and outside is worse. The van drives around the city for hours. There is no water, the heat is high and there is no lavatory. What is happening outside they see only through the windows. Mohamed Diab directs; he wrote the screenplay with his brother Khaled Diab. Nelly Karim, Tarek Abdelaziz, Hani Adel and Ahmed Dash are in the cast. It is an Egyptian, French and German co-production. The film opened the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. The whole narrative takes place inside the van; the camera never goes out and everything is seen through the windows. A vehicle of real dimensions was used and the actors worked inside that box for days. The matter it treats is polarisation; the film puts neither side in the right or the wrong and leaves both in the same heat. The narrative builds no plot; the scenes move with the situation itself. The film caused argument in Egypt and drew criticism from both sides. The narrative puts children and old people in the box as well and slowly empties the political identities of meaning. Its limit is the watching; the narrative means to be suffocating, the space is closed, and the ending merciless. Who it is for: viewers who like political cinema and narratives set in one place. Who it is not for: it is suffocating, loud, and the ending hopeless.