Posted on 03/26/2004 4:51:37 PM PST by missyme
CAIRO, Egypt (Hollywood Reporter) - When Mel Gibson (news)'s "The Passion of the Christ" opens in Egypt next month, theater owners are anticipating record ticket sales even though many people in this Muslim country already have seen the biblical epic on bootlegged cassettes or downloads from the Internet.
Piracy is a tempting activity in a country where a US$2 theater ticket is a luxury and strict censorship laws dictated by Al Azhar, the Supreme Muslim Authority, limit the number of Western films on Egyptian screens.
Hassan Saleh, a video editor in Cairo, recently saw "Passion" on a CD-ROM a friend had downloaded from the Internet. He and his friends, most of whom are artists and filmmakers in their 30s, shared the CD and said they loved the film. "We all know how this story ends," Saleh said. "But the beauty of it was the journey of Christ's last three days, the journey of suffering and tragedy. It was very impressive."
Saleh said the quality of the CD was "only acceptable," and he intends to see the film again when it opens in theaters.
Under Muslim rules, it is blasphemy to portray sacred persons in the media. Notably, in 1994, Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for literature, was stabbed by fundamentalists for including God, Jesus and Mohammed in his novel "Children of the Alley."
"Passion" appears to have passed the censors even though the film also contradicts Islamic doctrine; the Koran contends that God put an effigy of Christ on the cross and that there was no resurrection.
Saleh said cassettes of "Passion" are selling for less than $1 in Shoubra, a poor neighborhood in Cairo. Many of the buyers are repeat viewers; churches in Shoubra reportedly have screened video projections of the film for thousands of viewers in the past weeks.
"This is a film everybody wants to see, not because it's touted as anti-Semitic," Saleh said, adding that his Jewish friends in Cairo also liked the film. "I think it's because Christ is depicted as a real man. People can identify with his suffering."
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
I must have gotten that idea off a bathroom wall in high school or some similarly reliable source.
I stand corrected and better educated on the subject, and am grateful to my fellow FReepers for both improvements.
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