Zawya’s seventh Cairo Cinema Days programme offered films such as Hajjan by Abu Bakr Shawky, Four Daughters by Kaouthar Bin Hania (which was nominated for the Palme d’or and shared the Golden Eye with the Moroccan film The Mother of All Lies), Heroic Bodies by Sara Suliman, Inshallah a Boy by Amjad Al Rasheed and The Memoirs of M. A. Draz by Maggie Morgan. But the film I went to see was the documentary Gawlet Meim Al-Momela (The Tedious Tour of M), which I knew nothing about till it started, even though meeting the director Hend Bakr outside the cinema gave me a positive impression. Bakr, a filmmaker and a producer who studied filmmaking at the Jesuit Cinema School in Alexandria, debuted along with other five directors with The Mice Room (2013). She co-founded Rufy’s Films, a production company based in Alexandria.

Gawlet Meim Al-Momela is about the late Alexandrian writer Mohamed Hafez Ragab, born in 1935. It shares a title with one of his short stories. The film opens with close-ups of his face, his expressions showing he has no interest in sharing thoughts or memories. Sometimes he starts to say something, then stops and looks away. At one point he says to Bakr, “What are you filming?”

In the discussion that followed the screening, Bakr explained, “What made me to follow the life of Ragab was attending the launch of his complete works, apparently the only event involving his work that he actually attended. He was silent the whole time. Towards the end he grabbed the microphone and said, ‘What passed has passed, and the tragedy recurs.’ He replaced the  microphone and left.” Curiosity and pathos got the better of the filmmaker. “I spent seven years making this documentary. For three whole years I used to go on a weekly basis to Ragab’s house and when he saw me, he would simply go to his room to sleep. I would stay a little longer to chat with daughter Samia, then leave. At last, when I began to despair of making the film and stopped going to his house for a while, he called me during the Eid vacation and invited me back...”

Samia, then a student, wrote poetry, and her work won an award at the university, but Ragab was upset about this, scared that she might face the same destiny of isolation. In fact Samia lived with him till the end of her life. She died before he did. “Ragab died in 2021 and that placed me and the film in a little predicament,” Bakr said: “I needed his  opinion on the material in which he appears, but now he could never see that material. This placed more responsibility on my shoulder.”

As we find out in the course of the film, with great difficulty due to his short, often incomplete sentences, Ragab dropped out of school and started working as a newspaper boy and lottery ticket seller at Al-Raml station in Alexandria and later as a peanut vendor near Strand Cinema. He was a self-taught writer who started his career at the age of 16. He met the famous writer Lotfi Al-Khouli who liked his work and got the then minister of culture Youssef Al-Sebai to give Ragab a job in Cairo, but that didn’t last for long. He returned to Alexandria and worked as a civil servant at the Greco-Roman Museum till his retirement, then he lived in his self-imposed isolation till he died in February 2021, two months after the death  of Samia.

Bakr faced a huge challenge: overcoming the fact that Ragab never left the house. She had to create a whole world filled with images and imagination in the confines of that small house. There are scenes of him watching old movies using a projector, recalling Strand Cinema. When the word “father” comes up in a film title, Ragab comments that he never knew whether his father loved him or not. There are scenes of his daily routine — sleeping, eating, praying — and other scenes showing Samia cooking for him or shaving his beard in the sunny balcony. Bakr also shows the view from that balcony: the neighbourhood of Al-Wardiyan full of warehouses and factories, with a small canal near Alexandria’s port... “I was really depressed during making the film,” Bakr comments. “Delving into Ragab’s life was not easy, it sometimes put me in a very dark place.”

Ragab tells the filmmaker about his father forcing him to marry at the age 18, and how he had two daughters, then Bakr — who never appears on camera — uses the momentum of this story to lure him into talking about his writing career. He tells her of his overriding passion for literature and how he was always thirsty for reading and writing no matter what. He was prolific and he sent his work to many publications. He even co-founded the Cultural Association for Emerging Writers in the 1950s. One of his best known phrases was “We are a generation without mentors”: he first said it during an interview discussing the influence of Yehia Haqi on the short story. Ragab insisted that nobody exerted any influence on him, and this drew a lot of criticism which may have contributed to him leaving Cairo and his career behind, though he would never stop writing.

Ragab published his first book Ghorabaa (Strangers) in 1968, together with another book, Al-Kora wa Raas Al-Ragol (The Ball and the Man’s Head). His experimental style, sometimes called New Writing, was so distinctive Naguib Mahfouz praised it in his weekly literary seminar, referring Ragab as “a surrealist in a real world”. Ragab tells Bakr many people tried to imitate it, thinking that if you wrote in a weird way that would be New Writing. But it is about breaking language up into images, he says. The fascination with New Writing soon faded as realism took over, however, and editors began to reject Ragab’s work. His rebellious voice felt increasingly out of place.

Ragab was a sentimental, dreamy character, which comes through when he talks about his old friends Ibrahim Khalil Al-Wardy, who used to work at Al-Amerikein restaurant, and Gaber Abdel-Aal, who was a street sweeper, and how the 23 July Revolution of 1952 gave them hope for a better future. He then embarks on a story about one of his friends, another street vendor, and how his wife betrayed him with another man who she married as soon as the divorce papers came through. Ragab says the incident affected him so much he began to think it would happen to him too.

Ragab also talks about the “delusion” of changing the world that accompanied the July Revolution and lasted till the 1967 defeat. He mentions famous comrades like Abdel-Rahman Al-Abnoudy, Ibrahim Aslan, Mohamed Gad and Sayed Khamis as he describes living this delusion to the fullest.

Bakr is constantly trying to create a world inside Ragab’s house. At one point she screens the famous television interview hosted by the television figure Laila Rostom with the Dean of Arabic Literature Taha Hussein speaking to the then young authors Naguib Mahfouz, Anis Mansour, Youssef Al-Sebai, Abdel-Rahman Al-Sharkawy, Mahmoud Amin Al-Alim and Kamal Al-Zohairy. As if to demonstrate his point about not belonging in the literary scene, the whole conversation takes place in classical Arabic, in stark contrast to Ragab’s vernacular.

Ragab received a phone call from the then hugely powerful figure Mohamed Hassanien Heikal, the editor of Al-Ahram, inviting to work at the newspaper. But he never got the job because when the great literary figure interviewed him, it was after his controversial statement and Lewis Awad asked whether he felt his generation really had no mentors. Ragab said yes.

In the last sequence of the film, the young writer Ahmed Abdel-Gabbar comes to visit Ragab at his house, and they sit in his balcony drinking a cup of tea. Abdel-Gabbar keeps asking why Ragab didn’t attend the seminar they organised for him in 1995 to talk about his work and New Writing, explaining how much Ragab’s style shaped him. Abdel-Gabbar talks about Ragab’s early stories, written when Ragab was 16, about racial discrimination in America: even though he prefers Ragab’s later, more mature work about Egypt, these were brilliant stories.

Abdel-Gabbar seems angry with Ragab for choosing to isolate himself, suggesting he is scared of the same destiny. He asks Ragab whether he feels that writing is a sin. And Ragab answers that writing that is an atonement. Then he brings out the cassette tape of the seminar he didn’t attend and they listen to it together. We hear the Alexandrian author Alaa Khaled wondering why Ragab didn’t attend the seminar and questioning the reasons behind his isolation.

The film ends with pictures of Ragab’s book covers and his complete works published by Al-Ain in two parts  in 2011. The collection was edited by the poet Ashraf Youssef and included an introduction by Yehia Haqi, referring to Ragab as “an artist who was, undoubtedly, ahead of his time”.

The Tedious Tour of M had its world premiere at Aswan International Women Film Festival and was in the official selection of the Amman International Film Festival. It won a special mention at the Gabes Cinema Fen in Tunisia.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 8 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly