An engineer, a war veteran, a lover and an award-winning filmmaker, Enigma’s Mahmoud Salem meets daring director Ibrahim Batout; a man who has truly lived a life less ordinary.
n the 25th of June 1990, severely wounded and tied to an unmovable bed in a British field hospital in Bosnia, Ibrahim Batout was abandoned by his shelter-seeking doctors and nurses in the midst of a mortar attack. He thought he was about to die. Recalling that harrowing moment, he says, “That was the day I no longer believed I was invincible.”
Until that moment, he had deservedly felt like nothing could ever hurt him. He was a veteran of six major wars (the Iran/Iraq conflict, the wars in Beirut, Afghanistan, the first Gulf War, Sibilance and Somalia), all of which he survived without a scratch. And even after that fateful night, he went on to survive five more wars before switching careers and becoming an award winning feature film director.
This was definitely a strange career path for someone who graduated from the American University in Cairo (AUC) with a degree in physics. Engineer, cameraman, writer and director, Batout has had quite the journey. But for now we will leave him in that hospital bed and go back a few years. 23 years to be exact. To the period right after he graduated from the AUC.
It was the summer of 1985 and Batout was working as a communication engineer in Port Said fixing boat radios and loving every minute of it. Then DHL offered him a job in Saudi Arabia with a starting salary of 1,000 dollars a month; an outlandish figure at the time. Naturally he jumped at the chance. Then, one week before he was supposed to travel, destiny called…literally. “A colleague from college called me and told me she was working for a production company called Video Cairo, and there was a job opening for a camera technician,” recalls Batout. “I told her I’d already accepted a job offer in Saudi and was leaving in a week. She retorted by saying, ‘Listen, you have a week. So why don’t you just come and try it out?’ Knowing I had nothing to lose, I agreed. The next day I found myself on a trip to the Nile Delta with a camera crew. The first time I saw a camera sitting on a tripod, something just immediately clicked. It was, honestly speaking, love at first sight, and it was a love that never died. I’ve since fallen in love many times (he got married and divorced three times, the last of which was in 2002 and he has been “sober” for 6 years now), and you fall in and out of it, but the one thing that has stayed with me is the love for that camera.”
He declined the Saudi job and settled for a measly 300 Egyptian pounds a month. Every day, after his work as a technician was done, he’d stay behind and play around with the camera. Eventually he asked his boss if he could actually film something. His manager packed him off to a local supermarket and told him to shoot whatever caught his imagination. The resulting footage blew everyone away. From that day forward, Batout was no longer a camera technician but a real-life cameraman. A year later, his life would change forever.
On August 12th, 1988, there were mass arrests of Islamist group members in the Cairo district of Ain Shams. One frantic woman, unable to bear the sight of her young son being arrested and dragged away by police, threw a rock at an officer’s head. He sustained an injury that killed him within hours. The following day, in retaliation of the death of one of their own, the Egyptian police declared war on Ain Shams, taking over the streets by brutal force. Batout decided to film the clashes and the arrests. And for the first time in his life, he learnt what it felt like to take a bullet. “We were in a parked Suburban when I saw the police coming,” he remembers. “We had switched the car’s engine off to prevent the camera from shaking, since we were filming from inside the car. I took the shot, and they kept getting closer, so I asked my sound guy to start the engine and get us out of there.” In what can only be described as a typical film scene, the car refused to start. So they started running.
“As we turned the corner we saw a flipped police car which the angry crowds set on fire. At the end of the street there was an officer sitting on top of a moving armoured vehicle, holding a machine gun and shooting. I had my camera trained directly at him, so I thought he would never shoot at me. Suddenly I heard a gun shot and heard glass shattering right beside me and realised we were being shot at for real.” Batout got shot in the arm and his sound guy got shot in the back. Later that day – as he left the hospital – he asked the doctor for the bullet as a souvenir. Much to his surprise he discovered that two police officers had arrived at the same hospital and confiscated his brutal memento. “That’s when I realised what this camera was all about,” says Batout. “And I realised I could follow one of two paths: either do silly stuff like television advertisements, or do something of real value.” He took the second road and it took him to 12 different wars in 18 years. Bosnia was the worst.
For Batout, Bosnia was the only war he witnessed in which there was no room for grey. It was good guys vs. bad guys; pure and simple. It was during that fateful war that he got shot in the leg and faced his own mortality in a small field hospital. It was also where he met his Bosnian wife, and started what he refers to as the love affair of his life. “Love in war is beautiful,” he says wistfully. “Everything you feel is multiplied by 100. The passion was incredible. I would kill for her, because she was the only peace I had in the midst of this madness.” But after the war, the passion started faltering and Batout felt it was finally time to head back to Egypt (that was in 1997). His Bosnian wife refused to follow him, so they separated. It was time to make some drastic changes in his life. His days as a professional and emotional nomad had come to a close.
Of course being used to the surroundings of war, regular life in a peaceful environment seemed extremely alien. Nietzsche once said: ‘The man of war at times of peace is at war with himself.’ And he couldn’t have found a better example of that than Batout. “It was time to channel the negative forces in me into something positive,” he explains. “So instead of letting my emotions take me to war, I started my own war: I started making independent movies with no budget.” His first movie, Ithaki, won him critical acclaim from the Egyptian art scene. His second movie, the award-winning Ain Shams, placed him on the map of directors to watch. Written and directed by Batout, it won him the Golden Toro; the top prize at the 54th Taormina Film Festival in 2008. Set in the busy district of Ain Shams, the film paints a gritty picture of the inter-connected lives of Egyptians from all walks of life. A captivating hybrid of documentary and fiction, it’s a desperately honest piece of cinema. “I have this fantasy that there is a cinematic language that can talk to the masses and yet maintain its artistic integrity. Ain Shams is such an attempt,” he explains. “I tried to have different layers in this film to have each one accessible to a different viewer.”
After the success of Ain Shams, Batout began to feel he’d reached a plateau. He faced that most existential of questions: “Now what?” The answer to that question – like his success – came quicker than he anticipated: What’s next is 1/4 Gram, the film adaptation of the controversial heroine-fuelled bestselling Arabic book by Essam Youssef. “At one point in my life I was in a relationship with a girl who was a Heroin drug addict. And that girl will always be special to me, because she got me out of the never-ending self-destructive loop I was in. People who are tied in vicious cycles they can’t get out of – like Heroin addicts – have good perspective on others in vicious cycles they can get out of.” That’s why this film will see him reaching out to similar souls trying to get out of their own cycles of self-destructive behaviour; reminding them there’s hope and a way out.
His favourite Egyptian movie director is the acclaimed director Dawoud Abdel Sayed, who also has a habit of writing and directing his own movies. Writer/directors, as Ibrahim confirms, are people obsessed with their vision, to the degree they don’t trust others with executing it. And that’s how he views himself; as a writer director who is making art. But does he think that will change one day? “I am open to change every single day,” says Batout. “Thinking that things are stable is the biggest illusion one could have. You have to open yourself to the possibility that tomorrow many better things could end up happening to you.”
