KUDOS TO: MOHAMED HEFZY

When it was announced that Egyptian producer and screenwriter Mohamed Hefzy would be on the World Cinema Dramatic Competition jury at Sundance this year, following his recent jury stints at Venice and BFI London, we saw it as not just a recognition for the producer, but as a sign that the importance of Arab cinema was on the rise and it had found a spokesman in the debonair, multi-lingual filmmaker, whose prominence has been recognized even by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when they welcomed him into their ranks.

Mohamed has been on the international radar for some time, after he created his production company Film Clinic in 2006 and his films began winning awards around the world. One of the most popular figures behind the current creativity of Egyptian movies, he has written, produced, and co-produced some forty features in Egypt, the US, the UK, and the Arab world. Among our favorites are Clash, which opened Un Certain Regard in 2016, Yomeddine in Cannes competition in 2017, and the 2019 Sudanese film You Will Die at Twenty, which won the Lion of the Future award at Venice. 2021 was a bumper year for the busy producer, with three critically acclaimed releases: Feathers won the grand prize of Cannes’ Critics Week along with Fipresci’s top honors, while awards also went to Souad (screened at the Berlinale) and Amira (at Venice). No stranger to controversy, Mohamed began the current year with the Netflix release of the Arabic version of Perfect Strangers, setting off a perfect storm that’s skyrocketed the film to the highest viewership of any Arab-produced film on Netflix.

His current role as director of the Cairo International Film Festival, by all accounts a difficult assignment, has earned him more kudos and our esteem for overcoming the challenges to make a sparkling event with a strong cultural foundation that is both Egyptian and international.