Egyptian Films Lift Veil on Sex, Violence : Entertainment: New emphasis challenges conservative Muslim culture.

Pyramids may be the perfect backdrop for romance, but these days Egypt’s film industry is dishing out heavy doses of sex, violence and mayhem.

The so-called “Hollywood of the Arab world” has gone down-market. Prison orgies, drug dens in Cairo slums, rape and gangland shootouts are the order of the day.

The emphasis on sex and violence is challenging Egypt’s conservative Muslim culture.

In Cairo, veiled women walk past billboards showing actresses squeezed into low-cut dresses fawning on muscular heroes toting guns.

Young men flock to watch films such as “Age of Strength” or “Hilaly’s Fist,” which depicts a rugged Charles Bronson-type character who uses martial arts to execute a gang of rapists. It shows the rape too.

The films match what many Egyptians see as a harsher, more violent mood in their society.

“Many of these films don’t have anything you can call a plot,” said Ahmed Hassouna, a researcher in Egyptian films at the American University in Cairo. “I don’t like to say this, because it supports the idea of censorship, but I’m sure all the violence has an effect on people.”

The new films are much raunchier than the classical Egyptian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, which concentrated on love stories and domestic plots.

But even the brashest of what film critics call “contract films,” shot in as little as 10 days for lucrative Gulf video markets, are tame by Western standards.

Videos, satellites and competition from other Arab countries and India have cut into Egypt’s film industry. Cairo studios now put out about 30 films a year, down from a peak of about 100 in the 1950s.

Budgets are low, averaging between $100,000 and $200,000, with a total revenue of only about $10 million.

Although visitors find Egypt a gentle, happy-go-lucky country despite mass poverty and urban overcrowding, legal authorities say violent crime is on the rise.

A recent sexual assault of a young woman in a Cairo bus station preoccupied public opinion for several weeks. Judges worried by widening drug use have called for traffickers to be hanged in public.

No clear link has been established between lurid films and the rise in violence, but film critics say producers are targeting younger markets.

“Our cinema is absorbing all its ideas from America . . . we mimic them blindly,” critic Ahmed Bahgat said. “Most directors are either vulgar or merchants who want to entertain the public so they drench them in sex and violence.”

But one recent box-office hit, “Kitkat,” was praised for the way it showed the poor Cairo neighborhood of Imbaba with all its problems--drink, drugs, premarital sex and deep poverty.

Censorship has been relaxed in recent years. “We can now raise problems for the first time,” Bahgat said. “In the old days, to show doctors, lawyers or policemen as corrupt was taboo.

“But you get one film that raises problems like consumerism and drug use and then a series of others which exploit the spectacle and lose the perspective.”