Cairo Classics 2026: Journey Through the Past

The Cairo International Film Festival is officially at its 47th edition, running until November 21, but it’s also the 50th anniversary of the event, which began in 1976. It is no surprise, then, that the opening slot went to I Play Rocky, which tells the – somewhat fictionalized – story of another 1976 landmark: Rocky. John G. Avildsen’s original is not part of the lineup (whereas other festivals have screened it on a double bill with Peter Farrelly’s behind-the-scenes dramatization), but the film it beat for the Best Picture Oscar is: still painfully relevant today, Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men is one of the major titles in this year’s Cairo Classics selection.

Or perhaps we should say selections, in the plural, because Cairo’s picks from years past are spread across different areas of the overall festival program: the newly minted Cairo Kids section, for example, will give younger viewers the chance to see E.T. (1982) and The Lion King (1994) on the big screen (and it is worth stressing the latter is the original, not the photorealistic 2019 remake, although images from the second version have popped up in some of the festival’s advertising). The Midnight strand is also hosting some vintage thrills, namely David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (again, original, not remake), both from 1997, as well as Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942).

The main Classics batch will prove particularly pleasing for fans of Italian cinema, with Spaghetti Western aficionados getting to enjoy Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on the occasion of its 60th anniversary. On the more recent front, The Embalmer (2002) is the film chosen to honor Matteo Garrone, who will also be giving a masterclass as part of his visit to Cairo. A highly versatile filmmaker, with a career ranging from the Neapolitan crime story Gomorrah (2008) to an adaptation of Pinocchio (2019), he showed promise very early on with his second feature, about the dysfunctional relationship between three people.

And then, technically considered a separate section but nonetheless part of the same logic of revisiting film history, there’s Restored Egyptian Classics, which fills the Hanager Cinema (near the festival’s main venue at the Opera House) in the afternoon and evening and has proven popular with a younger cinephile crowd, at least in this writer’s experience (last year, at the screenings I attended from this sidebar, I was on the older end of the spectrum, and I’m in my late 30s). So popular, in fact, that one title from the 2025 selection is returning to the festival screens this year: Salah Abu Seif’s The Second Wife, first released in 1967 and considered a major work of a director known as the godfather of Egyptian neorealism (the specific film revolves around a corrupt mayor and his schemes to maintain control over his village).

That’s just one of the 29 films in the Egyptian restorations lineup, a proper treasure trove that highlights the country’s rich cinematic history, with titles ripe for rediscovery both locally and internationally, as many of the works featured in the selection were popular at home but less renowned outside of Egypt or the Arab market. The main exception, as far as the 2026 program is concerned, is Youssef Chahine, whose presence consists of the 1972 picture The People and the Nile, where the 1964 diversion project is depicted through the eyes of those who worked on it, Egyptian and Soviet alike.