A Quote by Tamer El Said
Every film has a political side. It's something that you cannot ignore. Politics is a part of everything, it's how we speak, how we perceive one another, how we hold this interview: Everything is politics. But it's a very different thing to just stuff your film with political messages.
Related Quotes
For me, what is political is very personal. Politics are not this abstract idea. Laws are the rules that dictate how we live our lives. What we eat is political. How we dress is political. Where we live is political. All of these things are influenced by political decision-making, and it's important to be part of the process.
Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.
The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
My family was entirely political, all the time, on the left. The opposite of that is not to be political on the right. It's trying not to be - politics is not everything. There's life other than politics. Politics intrudes.
Politics is different than movies. Politics are controlled by leaders. Leaders of every country have different interests. And they try to explain to their people why they should take one side or the other side. But in the movie its doing the opposite. It allows you to have a Universal Experience. You don't watch it as politics but as a movie. You don't have different reactions all over. It's so universal a language. It's not a political language serving a political agenda. The language of cinema is a world language. With the Hollywood movie, it brings about the same reaction wherever it goes.
I am very much into politics, but what interests me is sacred principles applied to that area. You know, many people are interested in alternative health who are never going to become doctors, or practitioners. That is how I am about politics. I am interested in the intersection of the Spiritual and the political - how spiritual principles apply to the social and political issues of our day. For me, the spiritual realm, is a more powerful place to speak from on those issues.
We happen to live in an era that is incredibly wrapped up in notions of political correctness; everything is seen through the lens of politics. But being political and politically correct is just another way of fighting, another form of power and strategy, an insidious means of manipulation.
I can't marry myself to one idea or one form of doing politics or one form of understanding politics. I believe that we have to play the game of strategy, and understand how to move the pieces because this is how the political spectrum functions.
I love to work. It's the idea of having someone else tell you how to make your film or how to sell it - that's the part I can't really deal with. I would rather do 1,000 things that are work than deal with one thing that's a political problem.
Many novelists say, "I'm not a political novelist" - myself included. That's a standard, even a default position. Whereas that divide between art and politics simply isn't possible in many countries. In Hungary, you couldn't be a fiction writer and then, when asked about politics, put your hands up in the air and say "But I'm not a political novelist." If you're a Chinese novelist, a novelist in a country where censorship is such an issue, how do you claim that politics has nothing to do with your writing? It's in your writing, it's shaping your words.
Each discipline has the capacity to be interested in politics, and each would ask different questions of what politics is, what constitutes power, how power is maintained, how it circulates, how relationships are formed, how institutions are built, how they fall. Every discipline would answer those questions in different ways.
This whole Oscar thing is so political. It's about how much a film grosses, and who's in it, and how well it has been promoted.
What happened on "As Cool As I Am" was, you know how in the `90s, "the personal is political, the political is personal"? That was a really big thing. Choices you made about how you recorded and what instruments you used and how much real versus how much synthetic. Those were choices that were seen as very political at the time.
I applied [to film school] figuring, "I need to find some structure for myself. I need to find a way to figure out what kind of filmmaker I want to be." And that is what film school provides you with. It'll teach you the basics of how a production works and the technical side of how to put everything together, but you could also learn that by working on film sets.
Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.
I would say that no film is apolitical. There are politics in all films. Any film that is anchored in a society, any film that deals with humanity is necessarily political.
Related Authors
Ahmed Zewail Quotes
Egyptian
Scientist
Anwar Sadat Quotes
Egyptian
Statesman
Bassem Youssef Quotes
Egyptian
Entertainer
Boutros Boutros-Ghali Quotes
Egyptian
Public Servant
Essam El Hadary Quotes
Egyptian
Athlete
Feisal Abdul Rauf Quotes
Egyptian
Theologian
Ibn Ata Allah Quotes
Egyptian
Author
Mena Massoud Quotes
Egyptian
Actor
Mohamed ElBaradei Quotes
Egyptian
Scientist
Mohamed Salah Quotes
Egyptian
Athlete
Mona Eltahawy Quotes
Egyptian
Journalist
Naguib Mahfouz Quotes
Egyptian
Writer
Nawal El Saadawi Quotes
Egyptian
Writer
Omar Sharif Quotes
Egyptian
Actor
Plotinus Quotes
Egyptian
Philosopher
Rana el Kaliouby Quotes
Egyptian
Scientist