Rebooted 41st Cairo Film Festival shifts into higher gear
Fest Industry Days doubles prize cash, moves into TV
LOS ANGELES, Nov 16, (RTRS): The Cairo Film Festival, which is the grande dame of the Arab world’s cinema shindigs, looks set for a watershed edition, its second headed by producer Mohamed Hefzy whose reboot effort is coming into full swing.
Besides the Middle East launch of Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman”, which is Cairo’s opener, Hefzy and his team have secured roughly 25 international bows and several world premieres. They’ve lured top talents such as Oscar-winning US writer/director Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”) who is presiding over the main jury, as well as Terry Gilliam and Guillermo Arriaga.
Industry execs making the trek include AGC Studios topper Stuart Ford, AMC Networks’ VP of productions Kristin Jones, and Netflix director of international originals Ahmed Sharkawi, just as TV becomes an integral part of the fest’s market component.
Launched in 1976, amid the Egyptian film industry’s golden age, the Cairo fest soon soared but more recently lost luster due to the country’s political turbulence. Hefzy, who is Cairo’s first president chosen from within the country’s film industry ranks, took charge in 2018 setting it on a new course that last year started to bear fruit.
This year for Cairo’s 41st edition – which will run Nov 20-29 – Hefzy’s multi-pronged vision has attained sharper focus just as his goal for the event to boost Egypt’s role as the MENA region’s main industry hub also seems to be gaining more traction.
“Cairo is really trying to be a big festival in that it not only shows lots of films, but it is also a big industry festival,” says Hefzy, noting that from an industry standpoint the Egyptian capital has always been more prominent than Dubai, which before its sudden shuttering last year had for a spell taken away Cairo mantle as the region’s top festival and market.
Reconfigured
In terms of the lineup – which Hefzy slimmed-down and reconfigured – what stands out is the push made by Hefzy and Cairo artistic director Ahmed Shawky to go beyond just showing the cream of the festival circuit crop. Instead, they sought out “as many quality premieres as possible” aided by a new programming team that tracks titles around the world and has made Cairo much less Eurocentric.
They’ve secured several world premieres such as Palestinian director Najwa Najjar’s divorce amid diaspora drama “Between Heaven and Earth”; the latest feature from Romanian auteur Andrei Gruzsniczk (“The Escape”), titled “Zavera”; and Colombian helmer David David’s “The Border”, a drama that’s won several work-in-progress prizes about a pregnant indigenous woman living on the ColombianVenezuelan border who is forced to fend for herself when her husband and her brother are killed.
Both Hefzy and Shawky are particularly proud that Arab films got more representation this year across various sections, including three titles in the international competition where, besides “Heaven and Earth” and Lebanese helmer Ahmad Ghossein’s “All This Victory” (which won a prize in Venice), a berth was scored, probably for the first time in the fest’s history, by a doc titled “Let’s Talk” that is also the only Egyptian pic in that section. Directed by Marianne Khoury, “Let’s Talk” interweaves a treasure trove of archive material with cinematic conversations between four women from different generations in the family of late great Egyptian master Youssef Chahine, Arab cinema’s leading light for over half a century, who was the director’s uncle. It’s a family in which life and movies are closely intertwined.
A key aspect of Hefzy’s Cairo Film Festival reboot has been to re-introduce and reinvent its Cairo Industry Days market component comprising the Cairo Film Connection (CFC) co-production platform, which this year almost doubled its prize pot to $200,000 for 16 selected Arabic film projects.
But the mart’s major novelty this edition is its TV component. After starting last year with a TV script development workshop, being held again this year by Screen Buzz, the strand is now rising to the next level with a three-day confab hosted by the USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Middle East Media Initiative (MEMI), a Hollywood mentorship program looking to boost the careers of Arabic TV writers and producers.