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interview with the director / texts about the film

Interview with Tawfik Abu Wael - April 2002
Diary of a Male Whore is a very complex work dealing with various levels of violence. It is touching many taboos, yet it is very poetic. How did the making of this film come about?





MOHAMMAD SHUKRY grew up in Tangeer under the occupation of Spain. He had a very tough, violent life and also was very poor. He succeeded to  learn writing and reading only when he was 20 years old. Seven years later he  wrote his biography: "For Bread Alone" in which he is describing his life in a very spontanic and authentic way, using a lot of hard expressions that seem as if life is more strong and amazing than our imagination. The biography describes Shukry's childhood and adolescents, how he discovers life and  sex which became also making a living for him. I adopted part of the biography, didn't take the plot, but I was totally impressed  by this biography because of the connections to my reality and my growing in a village and my moving to the city Tel Aviv.

Is that why you situated the story in Tel Aviv?

As I said, the biography of Shukry is a process of creating "some thing", from the tragedy, hunger, depression and the darkness. So that, the way of  putting the "disgusting" into an aesthetic and poetic frame, is what attracted me in Shukry.

The light plays an important role in the film: images of the present are very dark whereas images of the protagonist's childhood are very bright, nearly loud.
Still the way you use the light does not seem to represent bad and good, you show different forms of violence the male whore experienced in the past.

I like your observations about the light in the film. You are right.

Was the film shown in Palestine?

It was shown in Israel, at the International Film Festival in Jerusalem. There are almost no places to screen films to Palestinians. However, there is no choice to screen this film for common Palestinians or Arabs.

How did people react?

People were impressed by the film. Israelis usually said that it was very hard for them, this film. Arabs where angry about it, because of some taboo issues. However, a lot of people really like the film, Israelis, Arabs, Afghans, Chinese...

In which other places was the film presented?

Qatar, London, Cologne, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Paris, Belgium, Sweden...

Thank You.

(Interview with Irit Neidhardt, April 2002)

Nach oben


Review: Diary of a Male Whore - by Maureen Clare Murphy for The Electronic Intifada, 21 April 2003







source: The Electronic Intifada


Tora Bora cinema and independent media from Palestine by Sobhi al-Zobaidi FOR Jump Cut No 50, spring 2008.
[...] In Diary of a Male Whore it is the body that remains, only the body and its forces trapped within itself, fluctuating in the form of sexual perversions. This amounts to zero memory, the loss of it completely. This is the body as a sexual maze fluctuating in a sexual maze. A Tora Bora made of flesh, of smells and touches that turn the body mobile only in the way of reliving, replaying, reenacting the same memory over and over again, the memory of the mother being raped by an Israeli soldier. It is with this memory that Abu Wael registers the 1948 Jewish occupation of Palestine. This memory, this crystallized virtual, mirrors all other acts of becoming; it replaces and displaces the actual.

The main character in Diary of a Male Whore and the father in Be Quiet are two people with no memory. There is a vacuum there, some kind of collapse, a disorientation that forces them to go only where their bodies can take them. This ambiguity in their sense of identity as it relates to space and memory can be related to the fact that from 1948 until 1967, Israeli Palestinians had no contact whatsoever with Palestinians or Arabs anywhere. Only after 1967 when Israel occupied the rest of Palestine did they start to contact other Palestinians. So on the one hand they were not allowed to identify with Arabs and Palestinians and on the other they have not been allowed to become equal Israelis because they are not Jewish, and they still live this dilemma. [...], complete article 


Further reading in acedemic reference books



Dabashi, Hamid (2012): Corpus Anarchicum. Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body, New York.