PREVARENI / Al makhdu’un / The Dupes

Syria
1972. / 107’ / 35mm

Directed by:
Tawfik Saleh

Written by:
Tawfik Saleh, prema romanu Ghassan Kanafani

Producer:
National Film Organization Syria

Cast:
Mohamed Kheir-Halouani, Abderrahman Alrahy,
Bassan Lofti Abou-Ghazala, Saleh Kholoki

Distribution:
TYPECAST FILMS
Andrew Toms
Festival Booking & Publicity
Seattle, WA . USA
ph: 206.322.0882 x.205 | fx: 206.322.4586

One of the numerous Syrian films which deal with the Palestinian problem is The Dupes, the key political film by the Egyptian exilic filmmaker Tawfik Saleh. The film is an adaptation of an influential modernist novel Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani, famous Palestinian writer and political activist who wrote it in exile in Beirut, ten years earlier. The setting of The Dupes is Iraq.

Saleh and Kanafani adapted the novel together, criticizing corruption, political passivity and defeatism of Arab and Palestinian society. The film differs by its tragic ending from the novel which deals with the early period of Palestinian anti-colonial struggle and with the disappointment by wrong leadership. This change, according to Saleh, symbolizes the transition of Palestinian guerrilla fighters to armed resistance and hijackings at the beginning of the 1970’s. The three male characters which are trying to immigrate illegally to Kuwait in search of work and life outside of refugee camps, hiding in an empty metal water barrel in the back of a truck, represent Palestinian refugees of three different generations. A paradigmatic example of transnational film, its futile voyage, claustrophobic spaces without air and within infinity of desert, liminality and death in no man’s land, The Dupes serves as a metaphor for the state of Arabian society. Ghassan Kanafani was murdered in 1972 as a retaliation for the terrorist attack of the Japanese Red Army at Israeli airport Lod in May that same year. The film was banned in several Arab countries.

Tawfik Saleh, Egyptian filmmaker, born in 1927, studied film in Paris. He went into exile in 1970 to Syria and Iraq where he made films and contributed to the development of the local cinema. Since the mid 1980’s he has lived in Egypt. Motives of social injustice, political violence, underdevelopment, call for rebellion and revolution, pessimism and futility, poetics of neorealism and “black” cinema place him among influential names of the Third World political cinema. His most famous films are: Yaomiyyat Na’eb Min al-Aryaf (Diary of a Country Prosecutor, 1968), Darb al-Mahabil (Fools’ Alley, 1955), Siraa‘ al-Abtal (The Struggle of the Heroes, 1962), al-Mutamarridun (The Rebels, 1968).