The German Cultural Institute (Goethe) in Downtown Cairo was home to dozens of film-hungry fans last week. After several adjournments, the Cairo Independent Film Festival had finally found refuge in there to screen its selection of films.
The screenings – which were supposed to take place late November in the nearby Rawabet Theater – were canceled hours ahead of the festival’s official inauguration due to missing organizational procedures. Goethe, only one block away from the emerging downtown theater, stepped in and offered to host the festival.
A selection of 46 films from 19 countries has been chosen out of 500 entries. When asked, the viewing committee said that films were chosen on the basis of providing diverse choices for the audience. The organizers want to expose Egypt to different independent filmmaking ventures in the world, with the aim of showing films that adopt issues or ideas with which people can identify.
“We wanted to show films that people would understand, said Mohamed Abdel Fattah, the festival’s director.
This diversity was sensed by viewers who were adamant to follow the festival whether in its original location or its new one.
“The films were very diverse, from Iran, France, Egypt, Iraq Bosnia, Belgium and others. They were very different . Issues that came up equally varied, from war to death to fear to complex human relations. Even the degree of professionalism in filmmaking varied, which was a good experience, said Mohamed Abdel Gawad, who attended the first day’s screenings.
For example, “Mr Etienne, a French production, capitalized on the techniques of light in a way that almost concealed the fact that the film was digitally made. One of the things that grabbed Abdel Gawad’s attention was the conceptual approach of the filmmaker in choosing his audio techniques and camera angles in telling a story of an old man who lost his friends and who is left alone to the dual forces of death and departure. In fact, age, time out and death all interplayed in the film in a sensitive and highly communicative way.
Equally interesting was “Brod Ludaka, a short Bosnian production which, in the span of a few minutes, exposes the viewers to the breadth of war and destruction through a couple striving to get married.
Forty-five Egyptian indies were also screened in a chance to allow Egyptian independent film industry to establish itself on the international scene. Some of the films by Egyptian directors are productions of the first generation of the Jesuite Cinema School, a private non-profit school for amateurs wishing to pursue a cinematic career without following the regular academic path that entails enrolling in the Cinema Institute. The screenings were a showcase of faithfulness in applying the school’s techniques, while witty creative threads could easily be seized at different points, from script, to image, to sound, among others.
Of those, Habi Seoud’s “Yom Helw (One Fine Day) is based on a script that interplays a simple idea and an interesting dramatic cadence. An old man’s routine is marked by going to the nearby bar. The man eventually grows weary of the routine and, to shake things up, decides to take his granddaughter to the bar, where she savors her first beer, rejoices it and leaves her teddy bear behind.
The different lives that transiently intersect at a bar, the life that one leaves behind the doors of a bar, and the heartening relationship between the man and his young granddaughter that only unfolds at the bar are all ideas that come to mind with the sight of the filling of a beer glass.
Seoud dedicated his film to “the man sitting at the bar.
“Caika Bel Crema (Cake with Cream on Top), by Ahmed Magdi, is a short celebration of small things. Youngsters working in a trash collection site joyfully eat a cake they found preserved amidst garbage – one of them speaks about her craving for cookies and her male friend finds the cake and brings it to her, lovingly and triumphantly.
Magdi’s images are colorful; illustrating his creativity at conceiving a captivating scene from what could otherwise bypass our eyes as a regular occurrence. A sound track reduced to persistent outdoor beats delves into the making of this soothing picture, amounting into a cheerful experience and a contested vision of what life could be like in a garbage site.
Those films and more encouraged the audience to frequent the three-day event that compensated the cancellation of the actual festival. A momentum was captured, not very far from the one that emerged in December 2006 following the first round of the festival. While the organizers went out of the screenings already thinking of the next round, others scratched their head over what could be their next independent cinematic contribution.
