| 34th Cairo International Film Festival | |
|---|---|
34th CIFF Official Poster |
|
| Location | Cairo, Egypt |
| Founded | 1976 |
| Awards | Golden Pyramid |
| Festival date | November 30 – December 9, 2010 |
| Official website | |
The 34th annual Cairo International Film Festival was held from November 30 to December 9, 2010.
The Arabic word for festival, mahrajan (Arabic: مهرجان ), comes from a composite Persian word. The first part, mahr, means 'sun' or 'soul'. The second, jan, means 'love' or 'life'. In other words, a festival is an occasion to love the soul or enjoy the sun.
In modern times festivals often denote a cultural event, one of a specific nature that calls for emphasis, and one that has a set date, venue, and known sponsors and programmes, which brings us to the topic of this article.
The Cairo Film Festival deserved to have a poster that would highlight its message and draw the attention of the public to its various functions. Unfortunately, we had the face of Queen Nefertiti gazing down at us from the poster, as if this were a tourist event and not a gathering for film lovers. When Nefertiti was not the main character in the poster, we had a profile of an Oriental damsel who might have been Indian, or perhaps Arabian, as if this were a cosmetics or jewelry festival that had nothing to do with cinema.
The colors chosen for the posters were also dismal -- too bland to attract the eye and too cold to make a visual impression. A splash of red or even orange could have helped, but that was not to be. To make things worse, the festival's name was de-emphasised. So imperceptible was it in the poster that motorists would have had to park their cars to figure out what event this was.
The 34th Cairo International Film Festival, however, got quite a few things right. For one thing, it paid tribute to those Egyptian expats who have left their mark on international cinema. One is Fouad Said, winner of an Academy Award for technical excellence for his invention of the Cinemobile, a cinema studio on wheels that is said to have saved the American cinema industry in the 1960s and 70s and is still very much in use today. Another is Egyptian-Canadian television producer Milad Besadada for his successful shows on CTV. Khalid Abdalla, a British actor of Egyptian origin who has acted in international films, including The Green Zone, was given a tribute award. So were local actresses Safia El-Emari and Laila Elwi and cameraman Ramsis Marzouk. French actress Juliette Binoche, Korean actress Yoon Jung Hee and American actor Richard Gere also received tribute awards.
One of the most exciting categories of the festival is "Outside the Competition". This year, 11 films were screened in this category to great success. One was the Argentinean film The Secret In Their Eyesi, which won an Oscar for best foreign film this year. Others were Certified Copy by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, the Korean film Poetry and the British film Another Year directed by Mike Leigh.
The selection of Arab films was even better than that of foreign films, especially for films from the Gulf, Morocco and Egypt. Iraq alone entered four full feature films: Ibn Babel (Son of Babel) by Mohamed Al-Daragi, Hayy Khayalatal-Maata (Neighbourhood of the Scarecrows) by Ali Hassan; Darbat al-Bedaya (Kick Start) by Shawkat Amin, and Motashabek bel Lon al-Azraq (Grid in Blue) by Haydar Rashid. The United Arab Emirates asserted its presence with Dar al-Hay (Neighbourhood House) by Ali Mostafa, while Bahrain submitted Hanin (Yearning) by Huseein Al-Holeibi.
Interestingly enough, Gulf cinema was not only present with film. Saudi Director Haifa Ala-Mansur came in as member of the Judges' Panel, which was led by Egyptian producer Mohamed El-Adl.
Egyptian participation doubled this year, with four films in the competition -- three of them screened for the first time. These were Al-Shawq (Desire) by Khaled El-Haggar, Microphone "by Ahmed Abdallah, Al-Tariq Al-Daiyri (Ring Road) by Tamer Ezzat and Al-Bab (The Door) by Mohamed Abdel-Hafez.
A lovely and quite edifying touch was the screening of films from the 1950s and 60s, a practice that serves to illustrate the immense changes international cinema has undergone in the past 50 years or so. The oldies were: the 1946 British film of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra directed by Gabriel Pascal and starring Vivien Leigh; the 1954 US film The Valley of the Kings by Robert Pirosh and the 1961 Italian film Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile by Fernando Cherchio.
“Egypt in the eyes of the world cinema” is the theme for the 34th CIFF. Every year the festival adopts a different theme and in 2010 it was decided to bring together the different films that portray or take place in Egypt. This year the festival is scheduled to start from 30 November to 9 December, with 43 countries participating including Venezuela, Zambia, Greece, Haiti, Syria, Palestine, and Finland. Every year, the CIFF honors and hosts cinema legends from all over the world: Nicolas Cage, Sophia Loren, John Malkovich, Melina Mercouri, Marcello Mastroianni, Peter O'Toole, Irène Pappas, Vanessa Redgrave, Omar Sharif, Oliver Stone and Elizabeth Taylor, to name a few.
Following the 2010 theme “Egypt in the eyes of the world cinema” the festival will be screening 19 films from around the world that are set in Egypt or follow historical Egyptian personalities. These films will be screened along the ten days of the festival in various venues, the venues are yet to be announced, however, so keep checking the CIFF website for updates of screening dates and locations.
|
||||||||