Muhammed Hamdy on Blending Reality and Fiction in 'Perfumed With Mint'

OkayAfrica: You have presented a bold vision. Where did the idea start from?

Muhammed Hamdy: It starts not from anything specific but from many things – by thinking about cinema, my position, where I come from, and what that has to do with cinema. What is the tradition of cinema in the place that I come from? What I want and what I do not want are also very important. In terms of the themes of the story, I moved to a small village in the south of Egypt in 2014 and there was a very beloved man who passed away. At the grand funeral for him, whenever people mention his name, they would add to it “perfumed with mint.” I was fascinated by this tying of his memory to a specific scent. This is how I started thinking about memory and the sense of smell. Mint is a plant that has a specific fresh smell. I was taken by this way of honoring memory.

The film honors the memory and stories of people lost in the protracted Egyptian political crisis. It also exists as a kind of hybrid. What is real and what is fiction?

Honestly, it will be difficult for me to put my finger on what is real and what I came up with because this film has been a very long process, a lonely one too. So, I cannot remember. I am very sure a lot of it came from experience. I spent a lot of time at certain points, interviewing people and recording their nightmares. I was interested in nightmares as a form of archives and space of knowledge. So, I assume that a lot of it is real. You can call it fiction because it is a dream, and you can call it reality because it is also. I was interested in the idea of sleep not being a safe place for people who have been through a traumatic experience. From there, the concepts of real and imagined became unimportant for me. What is important is to be in-between because you cannot separate one from the other.

And not just nightmares, there’s a daydream quality to the film as well.

You have to see something when you make a film. It is like seeing a ghost and that is why you want to make that film. You are trying to tell people about this ghost that only you have seen but cannot quite capture. The film then is an attempt at capturing that ghost. Also, film is a tombstone for those who died, and we don’t know where they are so we try to make a shrine for them somehow.

What do you want from cinema and what do you not want? And how are these concerns reflected in this film?

I could talk about this for days, but I will try to be concise. I wanted a cinematic experience where I could liberate myself more from narrative rules. I was always fascinated by the concept of time in cinema because in real life, time is a human condition, but in cinema, you can treat time as a constant. This interested me specifically in this experiment. I wanted to liberate myself from the narrative because it has become too hegemonic, at least where I live and from what I see in the world. There are [many] great filmmakers, both young and old, who are doing this as well, so it isn't something I came up with. I [wanted] to try something dangerous, that might fire back on me. It is more interesting to make a film where I am tentative. And I do believe in ambiguity because if you don't admit room for ambiguity, then the work won't stand the test of time.

Did this film fire back at you and how so?

Making a film that I am not proud of would depress me. I need to prove to myself first that I can take a risk before I prove to anyone else. That is a personal need for me too because when I direct a film, the film also directs my life. I love that exchange between me and film.

The film feels overtly political even though you don’t quite directly address the situation in Egypt.

What I wanted to reckon with was the shadow of the crisis, not the crisis itself. We are living in the shadow now and that is more difficult. When there is a crisis, at least you understand why it exists, but a shadow becomes like a ghost and that is more complicated. For me, there is no point in making direct cinema about the political situation in Egypt because I live this reality every day in Cairo.

You are playing with form and structure and rejecting narrative, I imagine this was a tough sell for funders.

We always knew making this film would be like going uphill. People like familiarity, they like what they know, and not just in cinema. This isn’t a film that is written just to be creative. For me, I have to know human beings, see it in the flesh, go around, and find the ghosts. Sure, the financing process never expects something like this but that is where my producer Farès Ladjimi comes in. It is like a game of chess you play, win this piece, and lose the other one. You don't take the process of financing and development as an opponent because you are much smaller than the system. I am very proud that we were able to maneuver to make something like this and I don't mean this in terms of it being a good or bad film.

Talk a bit about the film’s striking visual design.

I am very interested in darkness, but I don't mean darkness here as an absence of light. I always thought that darkness should justify the sound and the visual designs. This allows you to establish a world that is not our world, but is parallel to it. When you watch this film, do not think that you are watching yourself or characters who are like you. Do not laugh or cry when they do, respect them and keep that distance. These are other people with other lives and more complexity, and they deserve respect. I always try to maintain the distance between who is watching and the image on the screen.