In the busy streets of the posh neighborhood of Zamalek, an hour before the closing ceremony of the 46th Cairo Film Festival, a nearly sold-out screening of Mehdi Hmili’s Exile marked the one of the last screenings of the 10-day film marathon. Dozens of young filmgoers poured out of the theater, glued to social media to follow the winners of the festival. Two film students were betting that Maryam Touzani’s Calle Málaga would scoop the main prize; both lost to a third friend who put her money on Dragonfly, directed by Paul Andrew Williams, which eventually won Golden Pyramid for Best Film.
Not far away in the Cairo Opera House, the glamorous red carpet looks and gossip have not overshadowed the carefully curated films, which proved to be a strong debut for newly appointed Artistic Director Mohamed Tarek. This year, it seems that the curatorial path of Cairo was chosen to echo regional festivals like Tallinn and Karlovy Vary whose strength lies in shaping the film industry of their regions.
This year the diverse programme featured many Arab titles, making their premiere in Cairo a smart move, even considering the rise of economically flush festivals in the region with higher budgets such as Red Sea, El Gouna, and Doha. However, Cairo has made it clear that it sees the presence of these festivals as friendly competition. The Saudi Film Commission is a sponsor, the festival has collaborated with El Gouna in the Cannes Marche, and has announced a new collaboration with the Film Committee in Qatar Media City.
Despite being sandwiched between El Gouna in October and Red Sea in December, the festival still has the clout to put together a high quality selection of titles in its dedicated section of nine films from the MENA region, Horizons of Arab Cinema. Winning the section’s award for Best Arabic Film was the story of a decomposing marriage set to a synthesizer score, Dead Dog by Lebanon-based writer-director Sarah Francis. The estranged relationship between the film’s couple, much in evidence after the husband returns after many years of working abroad, underlines the personal and even intimate topics explored in this eclectic selection, where political themes generally took a back seat.
Social themes, however, abounded. In the documentary Flana by director-producer Zahraa Ghandour, the filmmaker poses the question of why Iraqi families abandon their daughters. The answers are painful and encompass everything from religion and clan tradition to Iraqi and tribal law, but it is an original and valid approach to gender politics in the region. The film received a Special Mention. Other women’s stories dominated the section. In Azza, documentarian Stephanie Brockhaus presents a bright, unexpectedly upbeat portrait of a young woman and divorced mother whose personal search for identity and independence has little to do with men. To earn a living she gives driving lessons in her 4 wheel drive SUV, which she uses to tear up the desert for the sheer joy of it.
A very different workplace story is told in the highly stylized Looking for Ayda, directed by Sarra Abidi and set in a remote part of Tunisia, where the heroine is a prim manager in a call center. The film has a surprising modernity and its portrait of dehumanized office workers who toil for a heartless, faceless company is universally recognizable. In contrast, Ali Benjelloun’s Goundafa shows a traditional Moroccan tribal village that risks going backwards into extremist Islam, when the influence of a conservative new imam hypnotizes the male residents, leading to an economic, emotional and cultural disaster. But the section also embraced a highly successful comic title, Complaint No. 713317, which won a Best Screenplay award for the film’s writer-director Yasser Shafiey. Set in an Egyptian household where the refrigerator breaks down, it humorously highlights the gender question in a clever story.
Palestine remains a topic of interest and solidarity with the Palestinian people is an ongoing path for the festival. It placed Palestinian cinema at its heart with eight titles, highlighting resilience, dispossession, memory, and survival.
That being said, the festival did not forget its international scope, bringing titles from Germany, Pakistan, Hungry, China, and the US, in addition to a retrospective on Turkish cinema.
Maryam Touzani’s Calle Málaga was probably the most-discussed film after two sold-out screenings, with many of the audience praising the film, and reports of laughter and singing during the film. The same admiration was shown in Once Upon a Time in Gaza, codirected by Tarzan and Arab Nasser, which won the Best Directing Award as well as Best Arab Feature. Nevertheless, the Youssef Sherif Rizkallah Audience Award went to Mai Saad and Ahmed Al Danaf’s One More Show, which captures fragile resilience amid relentless devastation in the Gaza Circus Troupe.
From David Lynch’s short films to Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) and Youssef Chahine’s The People and the Nile (1972), a new generation of filmgoers has rediscovered world masterpieces. A happy phenomenon this year, which makes more and more sense considering the high percentage of young people in Egypt, is the presence of younger audiences engaged in all the sections, whether in the Opera House, Zamalek cinemas, or at the American University in Cairo. The interest in classic films, especially Egyptian, indicates a shift in the interest of young audiences who for years seemed only interested in Hollywood blockbusters.
CIFF is both following and fuelling the rising interest in independent international cinema in Egypt. The Cairo Opera House, once a closed-off space for ballet, classical music, and ministry employees, has become newly appealing to younger audiences thanks to accessible ticket prices. Meanwhile, the festival’s Restored Classics section—screening 21 films—offers a crucial lifeline in a country without a unified film archive and with scattered, often damaged Egyptian negatives.
The Short Films Competition continues to have a strong impact at the festival, one that is not just limited to film students and indie film enthusiasts. It continues to evolve with the festival’s global, forward-looking spirit. A beautiful moment took place when Abdullah Al-Taye’s extremely personal and sensitive short film Cairo Streets scooped the Youssef Chahine Best Short Film Award, a testament to Al-Taye who featured the veteran Egyptian filmmaker in his film.
For the first time, Cairo added immersive experiences to its lineup via its XR program, a selection of works both new and slightly less so (the Taiwanese piece The Man Who Couldn’t Leave was at Venice in 2022), showcasing the different facets of virtual, mixed and augmented realities. As we mentioned in our overview of the XR program, there’s room for improvement on the technical side, but as an inaugural foray into that world it showed great promise, with the potential to become one of the more interesting sidebars in years to come, particularly when it comes to giving a platform to Egyptian artists working in this field.
For the last six years, five different artistic directors have worked in the festival. As the position has to be approved by the Ministry of Culture every year, the continuity of Tarek and his programming team will be essential to establishing a curatorial voice that is unique to Cairo, one that is able make a change on the rapidly transforming film scene in the Middle East.
