Exhausted hands and tired bodies permeate through Chinese, Mexican, Korean, Egyptian, and even US factories. They all work interminably to fulfill the insatiable needs of global capitalism. Factory workers are universally linked in this way and rather than futility, this image alternatively can bring forth a sense of solidarity. Jasmina Metwaly (b. 1982, Warsaw/Cairo) & Philip Rizk’s (b. 1982, Limassol/Cairo) Out on the Street is a film featuring nine men from Egypt’s Helwan working-class neighborhood. In it, the workers describe personal stories of exploitation and abuse in their workplaces, as well as outside of them by the police. The men also rehearse and reenact some of these stories. More than the reenactments solely being a means to reevaluate the past, the improvisations enact a future that has not yet come. The performed scenes are interlaced with phone footage of the illegal destruction of a factory shot by one of its workers with the intention of it being used as evidence for the courts. This hybrid approach blurs fact and fiction and thus engages a more collective imaginary. The larger social struggle, felt in many places around the world, is made present and the film provides a space to imagine what a different future could look like.
Metwaly & Rizk are both activists as well as filmmakers and, frustrated with the limits of documentary, they made Out on the Street, situating it as a space where people can evaluate and rewrite their histories. Since 2011, they have collaborated on a regular basis. They are also part of the Mosireen media collective that was formed during the 2011 revolution in Egypt, which not only made videos but also carried out video workshops and created an archive of the revolution. JV
self-presentation:
At some point in 2011, while revolt raged on the streets, we took a break and watched Jean-Pierre Gorin & Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout va bien.
At some point in 2011, we filmed protests, sit-ins, workers taking over their workspaces, workers demanding their basic rights, and shouting them to the camera. One story led us to another and then another, sparking an idea to create a space in which they're somewhat compiled, where their protagonists play the roles of storytellers; where the workers themselves enact what they've experienced.
At this point, we’ve watched many films, like The Temptation of St. Tony, we chased down the works of Jia Zhangke and read Jean Genet's play Le Balcon. After that, it was mostly Peter Watkins and La Commune. La Commune (Paris, 1871), a film with 300 non-professional actors looking and shouting into the camera. These different threads lead us to experiment with film and its fictions, through improvisation and acting, re-enacting, enacting; we ended up with Out on the Street.
