Returning after last year’s dramatic cancellation, the 45th edition of the long-running Cairo festival had a rich international program but a special focus on strong films from Africa, the Middle East, Palestine and Egypt itself.
Director Milad Tshangir’s impressive debut feature ‘Anywhere Anytime’ puts a contemporary illegal-immigrant spin on Vittorio De Sica’s beloved Italian neorealist classic ‘Bicycle Thieves’.
Made in collaboration with feted dissident director Jafar Panahi, Nader Saeivar’s ‘The Witness’ is a muted but quietly furious protest drama about murder and misogyny in contemporary Iran,
Firas Khoury’s notable feature debut ‘Alam’ about Palestinian teens living in Israel fought off the competition to win Cairo’s main prize.
The toxic privilege of Algeria’s ministerial elite is the target of Merzak Allouache’s fitfully successful mix of class satire and political thriller.
Cairo awarded its best documentary prize to this broadly appealing fly-on-the-wall documentary about a group of musicians from countries bordering the Nile who go on a demanding hundred-day-tour of the U.S.
A past tragedy haunts the Slovak woodlands in this eerie mystery-horror in which a woman labelled a witch by villagers reclaims her power.
Danish director and anthropologist Christian Suhr’s feature documentary offers a respectful yet compelling peek into the surprisingly diverse communities of Sufi worshippers within the Islamic tradition of Egypt.
Luis De Filippis’ laid-back tale about an embattled but loving family on vacation pops with a riveting Carmen Madonia as the trans sister.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a pathological liar whose romance with an Australian girl unveils a horrifying backstory of racism in Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s genre-bending pleaser.
The fears and longings of four Lebanese boys on their way to lose their virginity is conveyed in interior monologues in George Peter Barbari’s poignant and deeply original first film.
Palestine’s 2022 Oscar submission is a brooding story of lives in limbo in the Golan Heights, stunningly shot and wrenching in its moving evocation of a man mired in self-loathing and paralyzed by the physical and existential no-man’s land resulting in the Israeli occupation and the disaster in Syria.
Rashid Masharawi’s upbeat lockdown documentary set in Montmartre is a one man show full of charm and humanity.
A well-calibrated debut with a fine central performance, weaving together notions of class and familial betrayal when an impoverished mother sells her son’s kidney to a well-off family in exchange for a better life.
Predictably stereotyped characterizations still deliver some enjoyable moments in this female empowerment story that unfortunately also plays to the region’s homophobia but will be a crowd-pleaser in the Arab world.