Q& A with Yousry Nasrallah
I saw The Aquarium at the SF film festival where Yousry Nasrallah was in attendance to take questions after the screening. Starting with:
“In the dining table scene, was the man in white, the ghost of Leila’s dead father?”
“No”, explained an amused Nasrallh, “he’s just the bearer. Though I do like your interpretation”
Speaking about the title and locale of the Aquarium, Nasrallah explained that it was the back drop for a number of love songs from films in the 50s. He was merely tweaking a tradition that held cultural resonance with Caiorites.
The character of Leila held particular fascination of the audience with her outward risk-averse liberated front which masked a repressed inner life. Sexual repression, societal norms and politics of the female body play out in Leila’s own life as well as in the secretive clinic sequences.
“That’s the terrifying thing about repression, you erase it, pretend it didn’t happen to you. This plays out again in the rape scene where you only see the victim and hear the mother’s voice. So while she undergoes a hymen reconstruction surgery, she can never talk about what happened to her. Like fish with no memory.” said Nasrallah.
He envisioned the film as an examination of memory and movement, as though all the characters were moving through water in a trance like state – seeing things but never touching anything.
Nasrallah spoke about the climate of fear that most Egyptians are born in and the conditioning that they are groomed into. “It was only post 9/11 that you [Americans] experienced fear but we have been indoctrinated to be afraid.”
