Alcohol, cheating and homosexuality: Netflix unleashes a storm in Egypt

Netflix wanted to strike a blow with Ashab wala Aaz (The best friends in the world in Arabic), his first pan-Arab production. Goal achieved : in Egypt, the most populous of the Arab countries, some are agitated to banish it and the others hurry to see it. It was the expected sensation of the beginning of the year : the movie (link in English) brings together well-known actors from Lebanon and Egypt, the two behemoths of Arab pop culture. And it’s the remake of the hit Italian feature film perfect strangers including the French version, The game, has already been a hit on the online platform. Three days after its release, Ashab wala Aazwhich tells of a game between friends that goes wrong, is at the top of the ten most-watched films on Netflix in the Arab world, and in France under the title Do we know each other or not.

An Egyptian lawyer seized the Ministry of Culture and the censorship service to make “to forbid” a film which, according to him, “aims to break family values” and the very zealous MP Moustafa Bakri called for an extraordinary session of Parliament to look into the matter. The story is that of three couples, two Lebanese, an Egyptian, who meet for a drunken dinner. During the evening, they agree to play a game: put their laptop on the table and share each message or call with the whole group. Wives discover mistresses, friends of betrayals, husbands of liaisons and the group that one of them is homosexual, all in a quasi-closed door.

Mustafa Bakri, he claims to have scrutinized each plan. Results ? “There are more than twenty pornographic scenes”, he asserts, while no erotic scene, not even a kiss, appears in the film, which Netflix prohibits for children under 16 for its foul language. The deputy, who regularly sets himself up as a guardian of morals, went on all the sets of the most watched talk shows in the country of 102 million inhabitants to demand nothing less than the outright banning of Netflix in Egypt. The wrong ofAshab wala Aaz ? Show a father talking to his daughter about her first sexual encounter after her mother finds condoms in her bag and “defend homosexuality when we are an oriental society”accuses Mustafa Bakri. “There is a difference between not denouncing a phenomenon and encouraging it”, responds film critic Tarek al-Chennaoui in a country where homosexuality is not expressly prohibited, but where the repression of LGBTQ+ people has increased since the election of President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi in 2014. And above all , according to the critic, Egyptian cinema has never been chilly.

Almost 20 years ago, audiences flocked to theaters to Sahr al-Layali (Sleepless nights in Arabic), the story of four couples who tear themselves apart after a dinner with friends with, on the menu, male impotence, adultery and differences between social classes. Several Egyptian films, including The Yacoubian Building, adapted from the novel by Alaa Al-Aswani, have already dealt with homosexuality explicitly. And the height of irony, in 2016, the prize for best screenplay at the Cairo Film Festival was awarded to… perfect strangers ! But in a country where conservatism and a rigorous reading of Islam have continued to progress, a woman concentrates all the criticism : the only Egyptian actress of Ashab wala AazMona Zaki.

On screen, Mona Zaki plays a woman caught between a stepmother who despises her and a husband who no longer touches her. In the city, Internet users reduce the actress, who was playing in Sahr al-Layali alongside her husband Ahmed Helmi in their early days, to her sole status as a wife. Rather than addressing her, they challenge Ahmed Helmi, one of the most famous Egyptian actors who is not in the Netflix cast. “How could he allow his wife to play this role ?”, writes one. Others go even further and ask him to repudiate her immediately. “It’s a courageous and original film”, retorts on Facebook Khaled Ali, a great figure of the Egyptian left. “Everything he talks about does exist in our societies, no offense to those who prefer to ignore it, keep quiet or attack”, he adds.