The Perks of Netflix

This blog post was written by Emily Greiner, a sophomore Flagship student and Arabic studies major.

Like most college students, I like to spend the majority of my free time perusing Netflix and Hulu for something to watch. One day while on Netflix, I stumbled across the international genre of movies. I then began adding essentially every movie Netflix had in Arabic to my queue. 

The first movie I received in my mailbox was "A Citizen, a Detective, and a Thief" (“Mowaten we Mokhber we Haramy”). It's an Egyptian film that came out in 2001 by director Daoud Abdel Sayed. Sayed’s film includes a star-studded cast of Salah Abdallah, Hend Sabri, and musician Shaaban Abdel Rehim who contributes several songs to the film. In addition to this cast was the well-known actor Khaled Abol Naga who was mentioned in a previous blog post about the film “Microphone”.

This comedy-drama is about Selim, a handsome and successful writer who triggers an elaborate chain of events when he visits police headquarters to report his car stolen. There he runs into Sergeant Fathy, an old family friend who now works as a detective. When the meddlesome Sergeant Fathy insists on hiring a live-in housekeeper for his old friend, Selim’s life becomes inextricably intertwined with that of his beautiful new housemaid, her thieving husband and the well-meaning detective.

The film was engaging and interesting to watch and I highly recommend it to any Flagship student.  The film also showed many underlying issues regarding police inefficiency, censorship, and class placement. The film faced controversy with its blunt sexuality as well as the critiques on censorship, police inefficiency, and the pretentiousness of the intellectual and wealthy class. However, despite these controversies, this film was a huge success with Egyptian audiences as well as throughout the Middle East.

I highly suggest that any Flagship student with a Netflix account considering watching a few Arabic films. I found it is very helpful to listen to Arabic being spoken whether it is al-Jazeera, a film, or a music video. It was especially helpful since it was spoken in dialect rather hearing FusHa like I would while listening to al-Jazeera. It’s always a really good feeling to know that you understand what the characters are mostly saying without using the subtitles.