Twenty years ago filmmaker Michal Goldman brought Umm Kulthum, the singing “Star of the East” who died in 1975 back to life—not for the Arab world where she still reigned supreme, but to foreign audiences who recognized, but perhaps never fully appreciated or understood her cultural power. These include scores of students who have seen the film in our courses, sometimes more than once. What makes Umm Kulthum: A Voice Like Egypt (1996) so successful is the way Goldman integrated the voice of the legendary diva with those of fellow artists, academics, and especially common Egyptians who proved eager to reminisce and even sing for the camera crew. The film is now a slice of time. I dutifully inform my students that young Egyptians have taken music in many different directions and some even decry the persistent tyranny of “The Lady” and her fellow musical icons.
After this hiatus, Goldman has returned to Egypt to explore the multiple legacies of Egypt's other twentieth century titan, Gamal Abd al-Nasser. Nasser's Republic is a project that was developed before the uprising against Hosni Mubarak, filmed during the tumultuous years of Egypt's Arab Spring, and, completed in the aftermath of the reassertion of military rule by Nasser wannabe, Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi. If the film was an important project when first conceived, how much more so now.
Disclaimer: I served as an academic consultant for this documentary. I critiqued the proposal, numerous script revisions and a variety of cuts. Goldman and I discussed the widest thematic approaches and the nuances of single words. Nonetheless, this film is rooted in her deep understanding of Egyptian history and what Nasser has meant to Egyptians during his lifetime and afterwards. The final cuts are hers. So is the overarching thesis that Nasser, making grave enemies and committing grave errors, fundamentally struggled to make Egypt a more equitable society in which Egyptians could, after seven decades of colonial domination, lift their heads and share their country's resources.
It was a rocky road, something highlighted by her Egyptian informants, especially those who lived the era. Hani Shukrallah describes the tingling feelings he still experiences when listening to a recording of Nasser announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal company in July 1956, the “lightening in a blue sky” of June 1967, and the conflicting emotions upon learning of Nasser's death in September 1970: “ideologically and politically you felt you had to reject Abd al-Nasser, but somehow emotionally there was this tie.” Khalid Fahmy, a generation younger, gazing on the recent competing iconography of Nasser, laments: “I thought we had buried him. It turns out he's still alive.”
To produce an eighty-minute film, much rich material fell to the cutting room floor. What is impressive is how many of the necessary narrative angles are treated. This will allow those of us who teach this film to expand the story; but Nasser's Republic also presents an extremely coherent story for viewers who might see the film in non-classroom venues and approach the subject with less background. So many vital storylines need to be introduced: the colonial setting and the July 1952 military coup; the Free Officer's consolidation of power; their early domestic and foreign agendas; their falling out with Muslim Brotherhood allies; Bandung, Suez, and Third World liberation struggles; socialism and economic planning; the upending of foreign minorities and the Nubians; unity with Syria, the Yemen disaster; and, finally, June 1967 and its aftermath, as the regime, pressured by Egypt's youth, endeavored to address both the Israeli occupation of the Sinai and demands for greater political accountability.
Wars mark crucial moments: 1948 stiffened the Free Officers’ resolve to act; 1956 put Nasser on the world map; and 1967 threatened to undo him and his revolution. They have been covered in detail in other films. This allows Goldman to devote more time to the story she wants to tell—or let her informants narrate. Even at their most passionate—their passion drives the story—the informants speak with a sense of historical perspective. It is perhaps best that this film took so long to appear, even as recent events enliven and complicate the issue of legacy. Distance has eroded the Manichean dualism between Nasserists and Sadatists, even to a degree between Nasserists and Islamists (the latter are now far more focused on the present than the past). Hoda Abd al-Nasser speaks for the family: “My father never said anything about his accomplishments. I believe he left our world without accomplishing what he really wanted.” Most emblematic—and captivating—is Galal Amin, economist and memoirist: “The world was different and what seems impossible now, seemed very possible then!”
The greatest challenge facing the filmmaker is to address the present without presupposition and without letting the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak and the subsequent 2013 military overthrow of Mohamed Morsi dictate her exploration and presentation of history. Nasser's Republic is meant to evoke and enliven the past, and it succeeds in doing so, raising compelling questions that do resonate today. What did Nasserism mean to Egypt and the wider Arab world? What did Nasser achieve and fail to achieve? Why was he such a force in Third World politics? How, after a string of defeats in the 1960s, did he remain a leader who so many Egyptians could not reject? How accountable should he be for the lack of democracy? Nasser skeptics may feel that the film is overwhelmingly positive, but their arguments are also given voice.
From a teacher's perspective, this film is a godsend, either as supplement or standalone lesson for such an important era of Middle East/world history. Nasser's Repubic is the first English-language documentary to focus on Nasser and his rule in over three decades, and to treat him as an Egyptian patriot and politician with broad social concerns and lasting impact beyond authoritarian legacies and the Arab–Israeli conflict (the last English-language biography was an episode of Drew Middleton's series ‘Portraits of Power: Those Who Shaped the Twentieth Century’ [dir. Jeremey Murray-Brown, 1979]). The storyline is crisp, the archival footage, much of it fresh, is gripping, and the witnesses are compelling. At the film's center is an officer turned politician who is photogenic, charismatic, shrewd, and sometimes reckless. His growing ease on the public stage is encapsulated in a wonderful clip, post-Suez, when he has some choice words for the British monarch. His resignation address on June 9, 1967, even if staged to spark a cry for him to stay on (I don't buy it), demonstrates a willingness to look his people in the eye and confront disaster together. He continues to loom over those rulers, elected or not, Egyptians and others, who still attempt to emulate him.
