Egyptian Film Fest Starts Wednesday at Royal

The second annual California Egyptian Film Festival commences at the Royal on Wednesday with a noon screening of “The Innocent,” a raw and impassioned expose of brutal political oppression under Nasser.

Written by Waheed Hamem and directed by Atef Tayeb, it stars the versatile young actor Ahmed Zaki, playing a simple peasant who becomes the perfect soldier. He’s so obedient that he actually asks why the political prisoners he’s helping to guard at a desert compound aren’t simply executed outright if they’re “enemies of the nation and God.” This is an angry, grueling film of bleak irony and timeless implications that is shot through with dark humor.

So far, “The Innocent,” a 1987 production--as are the other three films in the festival--has been shown in Egypt only in a censored version. However, Egypt’s Chamber of the Cinema Industry, which is presenting the festival in cooperation with the L.A.-based Sufian Films, is showing the film in its original uncut version. “The Innocent” will be followed at 2:15 with “The Lost,” a contemporary drama dealing with the drug problem.

“Wife of an Important Gentleman” screens Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Directors Guild to an invited audience that includes a delegation of 80 members of the Egyptian film industry, headed by chamber chairman Mounib Chafie. This powerful and engrossing film, set in the 1970s, also screens Friday at noon at the Royal.

In “The Innocent,” Zaki is a humble, very ordinary-looking guy, but in “Wife” he’s a handsome, macho, implacably ambitious and overweeningly self-important member of the secret police. Yet both Zaki’s peasant-soldier and his calculating policeman are similar in their tragic naivete. As the title suggests, “Wife of an Important Gentleman,” directed by Mohamad Kahn and written by Raouf Tewfik, centers on the marriage of its insufferable hero to a beautiful and educated young woman (Marvet Zaki) who discovers the impossibility of playing the role of the traditional dutiful Egyptian wife.

On Friday, “Wife of an Important Gentleman” will be followed at 2 p.m. by the romantic “Bite of the Devil.” The festival ends with a gala celebration at the Cocoanut Grove Saturday at 8 p.m. For more information: (213) 661-8848.

Loni Ding’s remarkable “The Color of Honor,” which has a benefit screening Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Japan America Theater in Little Tokyo, is the most comprehensive study to date of the Japanese-American experience during World War II.

Ding, a San Francisco film maker and UC Berkeley professor, frames her story with the infamous evacuation of American citizens of Japanese descent and the exploits of the heroic Japanese-American 100th/442nd Regimental Combat Team. Her focus, however, is on the crucial, little-known role that 6,000 Japanese-Americans played in the Pacific-Asia theater as interrogators and translators in the U.S. Military Intelligence Service.

The film abounds in astonishing match-ups of contemporary interviews and archival footage that is the result of five years of research. A man of late middle age will be speaking of his wartime experiences, then we’ll seem him spotlighted in a vintage newsreel. The effect is not merely dramatic but serves to validate the interviewees’ words.

Ding goes right to the heart of the complexity of the Japanese-American predicament, contrasting those men who thought that by serving in combat they could best demonstrate their patriotism, with that smaller group of men who resisted the draft on the grounds that the relocation orders were unconstitutional. Ding ends her film on a note of reconciliation, with several war veterans saying they now realize that the draft resisters were taking a heroic stand in their own way.

“The Color of Honor” seethes with cruel ironies--how, for example, homecoming for many Nisei soldiers was a reunion with still-imprisoned families in the presence of an armed guard and with a one-hour time limit. Yet if there is one quality that distinguishes this film’s graying subjects, it is their amazing lack of bitterness.

“The Color of Honor” is as understated as its people and all the more powerful for being so. For more information: (213) 680-4462, 680-3700.