onilecraM | Marcelino

John and I gave a lecture this morning to an undergraduate broadcast journalism class at AUC. We spoke about the foundations of our project, and how are shooting has been going. The students and the professor asked us different questions, but they were mostly interested in the why of our project. We explained to them how media perception in the Middle East is relegated to coverage of the war and coverage of poverty in the Middle East. To me, this seems to perpetuate the misconception that “We” are better than “them.” This film is a way to make a link between youth in America and the youth in Egypt. Why the upper class? There are the most similarities to their lives and ours back in the states. This increases the ability for audiences to relate. Is there a political element to our decision to limit our studies to one particular social class? Yes, there is, but we never claimed this project to be an all-inclusive study about life in Egypt. There’s absolutely no way to do that effectively in a one-hour film. In focusing on the social life, we make one link between east and west. We’ll leave the other links to be made by the audience. There are economic and political links embedded in some of the things our subjects have mentioned. Particularly, I think you’ll be able to see differences in the different groups of people that we interviewed even though they are mostly of the same age and social stature.

We went back to AUC to interview Selma and Norhan one last time. They both gave excellent interviews, particularly with regard to social stigmas in Cairo. It was the first time these two really spoke at length about these issues, and I think it really completes the footage we have of them so far. I’m really feeling confident that we’ve captured their identities and personalities really well.

So John and I went back to the car rental place to go rent our car. Turns out they had run out of the 170 pound a day Daewoo Leganzas, leaving only the 700 pound a day Jeep Cherokees, to which we said no. There was also a 100km limit per day with a 5 pound per km excess charge. So on the 1000km roundtrip to Sharm, we’d be paying another 3,500 pounds in excess charges. So we left the agency. On our way out, I see a small telephone number on the back of a car driving by that says “Rent-a-car.” So we call the number and find out that we can rent a car with a driver for 250 pounds a day with a 1 pound per km overage charge beyond 300km. So we made our reservations for the next morning.

Later on, I interviewed Nahla again, this time on the rooftop of our apartment. I just wanted to follow up on some more social issues in Egypt, particularly with regard to her identity as an Egyptian and how she sees things. Our other interview at Campus was more about her speaking generally about life in Egypt, not necessarily with regard to her own personal experiences. After hanging out with her for the better half of the last week, I figured that we had established enough repoire to ask her more personal questions. Again, another solid interview. I think she really conveyed a lot of great thoughts about social life in Egypt, contextualized by her own experiences living abroad and back here in Cairo.

After I interviewed her, Nahla insisted on interviewing me on camera. I obliged. She asked me several questions regarding my perceptions of Egypt thus far. I think one of my best articulations of social life in Egypt came during this interview. In Egypt, people complain about being judged socially by their peers, the root of this being in an interpretation of Islam that prohibits women from behaving in certain ways (be it smoking, drinking or hanging out with different guys, even if on a platonic level.) This seems to be the biggest complaint among all the girls we’ve interviewed. According to them, this social stigma doesn’t appear in Europe, nor in Sharm el Sheikh, which for the most part is a European tourist spot (except three times a year, when tons of Egyptian youth head over there to party.) This is why many upper class youth head over to Europe and Sharm (when it’s not full of Egyptians) to go party. In Miami, you don’t find a social stigma with a religious foundation, but you definitely find one with a secular foundation. You can only get into certain clubs if you dress a certain way, you have to dress a certain way otherwise your continuously judged, and even your close friends judge you based on who you associate with, especially on the dating scene. And in Miami, it applies to guys and girls. Sure, you can escape to non-ritzy places such as Ft. Lauderdale or certain parts of Coconut Grove. But then it seems like the floodgates open to a certain social class of party people (especially in Ft. Lauderdale) that are kinda trashy. While it’s fun here and there, it gets old quickly. The Grove is fun also, but definitely more of a college scene (albeit a UM college scene that is a social step above most college towns.) But it still gets old after a while.

So on the social end, life in Egypt and life in South Florida have more similarities than I thought, both on the good end (which I expected) but also on the bad end, which was not something I anticipated.

- M