‘I can’t afford bread for my kids’, ‘This country humiliates us’, ‘I want these words to reach the authorities’ – with sentiments like these, it’s not hard to see why Egypt erupted into revolution recently. Although filmed before that tumultuous period, Wael Shawky’s twin-screen video piece – shown as part of London’s ‘Shubbak’ festival of contemporary Arab culture – manages to document the feelings of frustration within various working-class communities in northern Egypt. Shawky adopts a simple procedure of pointing a camera and allowing his subjects to speak their minds – which generally entails, from farmers through artisans to factory owners, angry diatribes against the economy and government. Only the sweet sellers seem more, well, sweet-tempered.
Yet this isn’t a straightforward documentary. For a start, there’s the weird title, ‘Larvae Channel’, which presumably refers to what one fisherman explains is the government’s policy of seeding the lakes with fish larvae. Except that the big fish farms monopolise all the quotas, the idea being, then, that Shawky’s piece acts as a platform for the exploited and marginalised, those at the bottom of the food chain. More significantly, there’s the fact of two screens playing simultaneously, the interviews and everyday footage continually overlapping to create an uneasy sense of discord and interference.
This contradictory intention – to both represent the disenfranchised, but simultaneously somehow thwart the documentary process – also extends to Shawky’s sequel, ‘Larvae Channel 2’: a fairly typical, if occasionally heart-wrenching, interview film, featuring an elderly Palestinian couple in their accommodation in a Jordanian refugee camp. Except that actually it’s not a film at all, but rather an animation. Every individual frame has been meticulously traced over to produce an oddly solarised, outlined effect: the slightly dispiriting point being, presumably, that representing any experience inevitably also involves aestheticising, mediating and distorting it.