'Diamond Dust,' a poisonous pleasure for Egyptian moviegoers - 0 views
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Tearing down pillars of modern Egyptian history can be lethal, as author and screenwriter Ahmed Mourad and director Marwan Hamed recently discovered with “Diamond Dust,” a political thriller dealing with the Free Officers Movement and the coup that dethroned King Farouk on July 23, 1952
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“Diamond Dust” the book, published six months before the 2011 revolution, became a best-seller that year, but was not a source of controversy. Its adaptation for the stage in 2016 premiered without event. This August, however, when the film adaptation by Hamed, known for the daring drama “The Yacoubian Building” (2006), arrived in Egyptian cinemas, it created a stir.
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“Diamond Dust” is the first Egyptian movie to describe the 1952 change in government as a coup, rather than a revolution, as the state officially recognizes the event. In fact, the film is unapologetically critical of the whole movement. Egyptian cinematic works have criticized the politics of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, one of the leaders of the Free Officers, and of his successors' regimes, but the Free Officers Movement itself had apparently been off-limits.
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“Many viewers saw this vision as biased, as it addressed only Abdel Nasser’s flaws and neglected his virtues, while glorifying Mohammad Naguib with no reliable proof,” Shennawi told Al-Monitor. “Egyptian cinema suffered a lot in the era of Abdel Nasser, who exploited cinema to promote the ideas of the July 23 revolution and graduAlly root out any opposing ideas. Egyptian cinema started breaking free from those restrictions with the film ‘Al-Karnak’ [1975], which criticized Abdel Nasser’s era, and ‘Ahl Al-Qima’ [People on the Top, 1981], against [President Anwar] Sadat’s Egypt.”
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many Nasserists and supporters of the 1952 revolution have harshly criticized the film. Last month, Magdy Eltayeb, film critic for the newspaper Al-Qahira, posted on his personAl Facebook page, “Diamond dust is poisonous. … [The film] adopted a stance against the 1952 revolution. … It showed excessive sympathy with the Jews to the extent that this has undermined this work’s aesthetic vAlue as a film noir.”
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A hit, “Diamond Dust” has so far earned 27.6 million Egyptian pounds ($1.5 million) at the box office.