BASHTAALAK SA’AT (Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day?)is a contemporary queer musical taking Arab folktales as its formal reference, and Egyptian pop music as its primary sonic material. It is based on the filmmaker's personal love diary and told in the form of a “One Thousand and One Nights” tale, where stories playfully unfold through conversations between Shahrazad, a narrator who never comes into view, and ghosts of former lovers.
For the last four years, and through intensive collaborations with several artists and performers, we have sought to make a film that is at once queer and Arab, not only in its content, but also in its form and aesthetic language. By expanding the possibilities of pop cultural genera, such as traditional storytelling, music videos, TV series, and musical theatre, the film pushes towards a queer Arab aesthetic language, one that engages with the history from which it emerges while proposing a counter-position far from exoticization or victimization.
By using an aesthetic language—as well as narrative and audiovisual references—that are shared within queer Arab communities, the film seeks to achieve a high level of cultural intimacy, and create a world in which queer Arabs could recognize themselves through common frameworks of memory: stories they are familiar with, words they use, songs they love, and jokes understood from half a word.
While “One Thousand and One Nights” has widely circulated throughout Western academic and literary circles, there has been little work on the ways Arab audiences have engaged with it, and the different ways they continue to relate to it today.
The men in this film are not victims. Despite their vulnerability, they are strong and outspoken. They are unapologetically gay and unapologetically sexual. Through multiple forms of storytelling, including narration, singing and dialogues, they offer an alternative narrative to prevalent representations of the Arab gay man, seen as perpetually troubled by his oppressed sexuality. Throughout the film, they gradually carve a queer lover’s discourse using traditional modes of storytelling and various registers of language deeply rooted in Arab popular culture.
While “One Thousand and One Nights” has widely circulated throughout Western academic and literary circles, there has been little work on the ways Arab audiences have engaged with it, and the different ways they continue to relate to it today. I myself came to know “One Thousand and One Nights” mainly through the Egyptian radio show of the same name, and later the television series that aired every Ramadan throughout the '80s and ’90s. Such renditions of the book in popular culture make up the main visual and linguistic references for the film.
The Shahrazad-like female narrator in the film, therefore, marks in her presence both a long history of Arabic storytelling and a recognizable pop-cultural signification. The symbolic revival of familiar pop-cultural idols is an attempt to think through the available narration tropes within Arab cultural production, that retain a significant value to the region’s queer history while in themselves continuously reproducing a heteronormative rendering of love. Although her presence pays tribute to the figures that resonate across the region’s queer subjectivities, her simulated green-screen imposition on the stories, as well as the queering of her characteristic rhyming monologues, begin to sketch out the space of the film as an intricately woven imaginary.
While the use of the green screen is also a reference to the “One Thousand and One Nights”TV series, where the technique was used extensively, it is also a proposal for a uniquely queer space characterized by clandestine experiences, multiplicity of narratives, a sense of dislocation, and a continual juxtaposition of reality and fantasy. Unfolding in a contemporary queer temporality and setting, that cannot be easily located as here nor there, the characters chronicle their intimate stories within a green screen studio which is transformed to different generic spaces: rooms, bars, clubs, forests, or beaches. Their constructed presence at once captures personal romantic experiences and proposes a collective queer space in which memories, hopes, dreams, and futures could live and play out.
Mohammad Shawky Hassan
Berlin, January 2022
