Local cultural doc an intimate look into the Arab experience

He is an adept barber, as deft with the electric razor as he is with the straight blade. With a room full of customers, he handles one after another, easily and smoothly shaving and trimming their beards and pates as he engages them in friendly conversation, alternating between playful and serious.

He is exactly like every other barber I’ve ever witnessed: a real man of the people who is easy to talk to and always with something to say.

Jamal Cherkouai is also an Arab man. Documentarian Nisreen Baker would like to introduce you to him and several of his friends at Eden Jamal Studio, his Perron Street barbershop. They’re all Arabs too, except they’re not exactly just like him.

Her new film, Things Arab Men Say, is meant not only as a kind of fly-on-the-wall look into a room filled with Arab men of all different kinds of backgrounds and experiences. It’s meant to open up the doors so to speak so that the general public can start to become more familiar with them.

The first impression one gets is that no, they’re not all alike.

“I wanted to really introduce the Arab community to the larger, mainstream Canadian community. Of course, in the post 9/11 world, there are a lot of misconceptions about Arabs. One of the major things that I wanted to bring about is the 50 shades of Arabs, if you will,” she explained with a joke.

She proffers that the Arab world encompasses more than 20 countries with dozens of different languages and dialects. When she made the arrangements for this production, she and Jamal filled his waiting room with as many of those ‘50 shades’ as they could.

“What got me interested really is that that group was diversified enough.”

This microcosmic look at the Arab world includes men of Lebanese, Palestinian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Sudanese, and Libyan descent, and there’s even a second generation Canadian for good measure. They all represent some of the different Arab faiths including Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Druze, some secular Arabs, and a Christian.

“Christian Arabs?” the proverbial unsuspecting film viewer might say. “I didn’t even know there was such a thing.”

“It was an eye-opener for me,” explained Fisal Asiff, one of the subjects in the film. “I always thought in my mind that if you’re an Arab, you’re a Muslim automatically. It’s not so.”

Jamal and Fisal are joined in the film and in the barbershop by Jay, Ghassan, Adnan, Falah, Bashar, Ramey and Hassan. It’s a veritable cross-section of the Arabian experience and Baker shot hours and hours of footage before editing and condensing it all down to this 50-minute piece. It’s pretty dense at times, as the conversations carry from topic to topic.

They talk about everything under the sun. They talk of the similarities and differences between the Arabic peoples. They discuss what it’s like being Arabic in North America, and how well they’ve integrated and been accepted by their communities.

They talk about raising kids, keeping their culture, religion, politics – you name it. The conversation gets serious but the laughter always comes back. They stay friendly and they keep talking.

Man, do they talk. The convivial bunch shows that there are some things that transcend culture. You get a group of men from any other culture and put them in a barbershop for a day, the atmosphere and conversation would be much the same, I suspect.

“There was a lot of politics in it that was edited. There was a lot of jokes in it, a lot of bad jokes in it,” Asiff, a local journalist and publisher with Alberta Business Research, recalled. “They just kept filming. They never stopped.”

It’s that freestyle kind of production that gives this film its charm in Jamal’s quaint shop. You, the viewer, are sitting in the room with the guys. Baker wanted to make sure that it was as open as possible for them to express themselves as they normally would. “Those guys were incredible in that they didn’t shy away from any topics,” she said.

“I wanted to show that palette, that variety that we have in what we call the Arab world. The idea is not to paint us all with the same brush and to really understand that … we’re very different than the image presented in the media. It’s very oversimplified and it paints the whole Middle East with the same bold brush.”

She also wanted to bridge the gaps between the various segments of the Arab community itself. This conversational film is all about furthering the discussion especially outside of the theatre.

“Within the larger Canadian society, I would like to see that conversation start around, ‘Okay, they’re not all one and the same.’ The good ones that we happen to meet are not the exception to the rule. There are actually many of them around. I believe that talking to one another rather than talking at each other will solve a lot of issues.”

One thing that sure stands out is how pleased they are to call this place their home. Some of them came of their own accord but others fled political or civil unrest in the lands of their birth.

“The only time that I felt there was a semblance of home, that you have an identity … was when I came here to Canada,” Ghassan says at one point.

Cherkouai said that he came to Edmonton, leaving his homeland 40 years ago, because he wanted to get married and thought that this would be a good place to raise his children. It’s not because he likes the snow, he noted. It was important for him to participate in this documentary so that his story could be told.

“I’d like other people to know more about my background and other Arab people’s backgrounds, and what we think about Canada.”

“The general public now associates Arab men with terrorism and so on, ISIS and shit like that. What I’d like for people to take from it is that we’re just ordinary guys. Even the guys who are immigrants, they’re still ordinary guys. They live normal lives. To them, Canada is home,” Asiff added.

“All of these fellows, this is home. This is their kids’ home. They value everything that everybody else does. They want to live normal lives.”