It was in the Teatro del Lago in 1963 that I saw the film Lawrence of Arabia for the first time…According to my mother, I couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks. The harder I tried to make the story clear to her, the more I realized that a simple retelling was beside the point…she said, Who wants to see a movie with a lot of sand and sun anyway?
-Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology, Steven Caton
I will tell you who…KhairAllah, Bilal, Hamid, the other drovers gathered that night in the Cairo camel market for an outdoor projection in 1990 (see blog entry January 10, 2019), and all the villagers in Dar al-Kababish who saw the movie on my screening tour with KhairAllah in 2006. Not too much sand and sun for any of them, but a lot of familiar faces on screen and a lot of up country dialect they understood perfectly well that had gone right past the big city audiences in Cairo and Khartoum.
In the scene when Yusuf says what the BBC translated as, Why don’t you fall in a hole?, they laughed their heads off in Dar al-Kababish but sat in silence at the University of Khartoum. Yusuf himself might not have wanted to see it, because his behavior at the end of the film did not reflect well on him, but he was killed in a car crash not long after, whether returning from another camel drive to Egypt I do not know.