Film festival shines a light on Middle East life

▶ The visionaries behind Egypt’s art house Arab film celebration tell Heba El-Sherif about the challenges of selection and representing the realities of life in the Middle East through cinema

Once again, Cairo Cinema Days – the initiative of Egypt’s only art house cinema, Zawya – is presenting a curated recap of Arab films produced in the past 18 months.

Showing across three cinemas

– with screenings scheduled in Alexandria, Ismailia and Port Said

– its title is a nod to neighbouring festivals Beirut Cinema Days, the Palestinian Days of Cinema and Tunisia’s full-grown, high-profile Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage.

Between narrative films, documentaries and shorts, the second edition of the film festival will screen 34 films from 10 Arab countries, over seven days. “I’d say that most of the films are about what it means to live in the Middle East today ... there’s also this idea of in-between,” says Zawya’s managing director, Youssef Shazli.

Shazli explains that the selection started in December, taking Zawya’s programming team of four to the Dubai International Film Festival and then the Berlinale for initial research.

“You only see trends when you put films together ... our taste is peripheral,” says filmmaker and Zawya head curator Alia Ayman about the festival strategy and practice of producing a cinematic “survey” with “minimal intervention”. It includes a catalogue of relatable films that impressed judges at international festivals and ones with familiar directors.

Lesser-known, experimental projects also make their way to the final lineup. With or without them, however, Cairo Cinema Days remains a challenge to market. Short of big directors and popular stars to flaunt, and due to their distinct mode of address, “these films don’t have the same selling elements [as their commercial counterparts]”, Shazli says.

However, at Zawya, there is no intention to dumb down the selection for the sake of sales. “Our primary role is [to be] a platform, yes, but what we are also very interested in doing is making our presence useful for the making of cinema,” Ayman says. “Films become important because they are urgent.”

This trend, which is particularly evident in issue-driven, politically saturated Arab films that are produced – fully or partially – outside the region, compelled Ayman to create a new section, titled On Defiant Images, spotlighting Arab artists who play with form. Sitting at the intersection of a genuine awareness of the sociopolitical landscape and an ability to meditate towards new, imaginative realities, the makers behind these films “don’t deliver what is expected of them”, and in doing so, Ayman says, they fight the traditional functions that funders often impose on films.

By way of embracing self-criticism, Shazli says the pool from which Zawya chooses films could be rethought.

“There’s definitely something wrong when our starting point is always other, bigger festivals that decide for us which the good films are, and which aren’t,” he says, acknowledging that the challenge lies in scarce resources and an undersized programming team.

At the outset, Zawya, which is Arabic for “perspective”, screened one film at a time, renting their only screen from a decades-old cinema in the heart of downtown Cairo. More a project than a venue, today, four years on, its team hosts several screenings at a time, leads directors’ talks, workshops, contests, and the Panorama of the European Film, an annual showcase of skilfully curated films that has become a favourite among Cairo’s cinema-goers.

Shazli and Ayman, who together lead curation around the year, are part of a community of cultural operators who are piercing through the cultural hegemony by “making room for the underdog,” as Ayman put it recently.

To her, the intention behind Cairo Cinema Days’ selection is two-fold. First, there’s a desire “to get audiences to watch these films”. When viewers are introduced to new directors and unconventional cinematic languages, and audiences are encouraged to engage with the issues at the centre of contemporary documentaries, “the alternative cinema will no longer be obscure”.

“We [also] attempt to answer the question: Where do these films go afterwards? We don’t have internal mechanisms to give value to these films [outside of festivals],” Ayman says.

Most of the films that make up this year’s line-up are co-productions. On one level, the festival sets out to test whether there is a possibility for these films to appeal to local audiences, which would be a triumph for regional distributors, who are often unable to secure commercial releases in the cities from which the films’ stories originate.

But can these films attract a big enough audience that would be willing to pay for a ticket to watch them at regular theatres? Surely not in our immediate future, but Ayman maintains that “we can do more by being aware ... of the constraints of this economy, and how to dodge these issues”.