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The Festival, now a 27-year-old ‘youth’, has undergone several philosophical and administrative
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It
is “that time of the year” again and the challenge I confront annually is
embodied in the question: what should I write about the Cairo International Film
Festival after its round is over? Year after year, the audience would change, my
writing source would differ, but the Festival? Well--let’s give it a start!
The Cairo International Film Festival, now a 27-year-old ‘youth’, has
undergone several philosophical and administrative changes. Only a few aspects
have remained constant during the past six years. The main aspects are the vast
opportunities to watch new movies from different places, and the swarming
public, craving for “hot” scenes overlooked by the censorship body, whose
job it is to cut similar scenes from the movies shown at the local cinemas
throughout the rest of the year.
Although the Cairo Film Festival is not the only film festival organized on
Egyptian soil-there are also the Alexandria and Ismailiyya International Festivals—the Cairo
festival stands alone in a dazzling light that characterizes it with peerless
noise and debate.
Films and Awards
Some
films were screened within the Festival’s official competition while others
were not. Following is an account of the most outstanding competition films,
whether award winners or otherwise:
The
Father:
produced 2002 (China)
The
Father is the only film that claimed two awards during this year’s round:
Best Director and Best Actor. The movie is about Yang, the humble worker who
recently retired after a long career fraught with regularity and commitment to
his work in an equipment and vehicles factory. For the first time in his life,
Yang is given the opportunity to acquaint himself with his family’s problems
on the individual level.
The course of the film’s events spins a very complicated web of questions and
equations typical of everyday human life. Of these conflicts is the duality of
staying in a small town or moving to the capital city where job opportunities
are plenty but where social relations are weaker and mutual trust, security and
the cozy familial atmosphere missing. The movie also depicts the conflict of
attitudes between the old and the young, the view of what is right and what is
wrong, the will, blights and disciplines of life and the meaning of happiness.
The minute details of paternal feelings are, for the first time, visualized on
the screen—a welcome change, as we are used to seeing movies tackling
motherhood! The film succeeds in envisaging feelings of care and compassion,
along with strictness and sometimes severity, all emanating from the heart of a
loving father whose surging emotions overwhelm him. He is harsh at times but
forgives, supports and watches over his family, even if from afar. Though the
story bears neither thrilling surprises nor suspenseful events, the simple but
difficult and interesting equation lies in the cast’s performance and their
treatment of the film’s topic. Despite its slow cadence, the movie is
different, touching and deserves, in my opinion, the prizes it won.
Down
by Love:
produced 2003 (Hungary)
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In down by lov , only one heroine-actress appears in the film
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This
movie is an adventure story. Because it is unique, it grabbed the audience’s
attention and was the topic of discourse among the attending critics and
journalists throughout the Festival’s period. It won the appreciation of the
competition’s jury, who awarded it a prize.
Only
one heroine-actress appears in the film. The audience, every now and then, hears
voices, sees photographs and reviews a series of flashbacks depicting the
childhood of a female foundling who gets involved in a sexual relationship with
the man in whose house she was raised. She becomes a prisoner of this unstable
relationship, which continued for some time between them.
The scenes mostly portray the internal and external conflict of the main
character and try to paint the details of the inner world of the girl as she
recalls the past relationship with her foster father-lover, and his
family—wife and children!
The
movie’s style of narration, no doubt, reduces the production costs to the
minimum because the course of events depends on one actress who moves between
the rooms of one apartment. The movie succeeds in conveying the psychological
disorder the lonely heroine suffers from and the gradual increase in her sickly
disposition, which climaxes in her suicide at the end.
Another movie screened within the competition also tries to focus on one
character, but through a different method and by the employment of a wider
setting, which normally raises the production costs. The Russian movie, Falling
Up breaks into the hidden world of a 30-year-old lady who is married to
a high official, which has secured her a place in the new aristocratic class, or
the “neo-aristocracy.”
Despite
the easy and soft life the heroine leads—expensive clothes, a spacious
apartment overlooking a marvelous view, etc.—she suffers from a depressing
feeling of emptiness, boredom, meaninglessness and futility. Her arid
relationship with her career-minded husband, who has a love affair with another
woman, increases the wife’s tension and sterile daydreams. On the pretext of
travelling on business, her husband leaves her to spend some free time with his
mistress. During his absence, the wife rashly and desperately establishes a
relationship with a mysterious man, after which many surprises and discoveries
take place. The wife steers clear of all these troubles and the last scene
ironically bears more questions and juxtapositions, not the awaited resolution
expected in such a scene.
The movie is an adaptation of a novel written by an academic writer who is a
specialist historian and a researcher in Egyptology. Attending the competition,
she received remarks, questions and praise (which the film deserves). In fact,
it deserved the Best Actress Award, but politics has its own balance!
Filles Uniques: produced 2003
(France)
France
won the Best Actress Award, which was given jointly to the two heroines of the Filles
Uniques movie. It attracted nobody’s attention despite its detailed
anatomy of the complicated relationship between an upper-class female lawyer and
a simple lower-class woman who steals expensive shoes from shopping malls. The
two of them meet and start a wonderful relationship of integration and
friendship and enjoy helping each other.
The
Stringless Violin:
produced 2003 (Indonesia)
This
film won the artistic excellence award. It relates the story of a 30-year-old
woman who leaves her birthplace in Jakarta, the capital city, to start a new life in another city. She transforms her
grandmother’s house into a care center for disabled children, especially those
who are orphans. Her relationship with one of them develops, upon which the
sequence of events develop.
The movie, according to the critics, contains stunning surprises embodied in its
poetic nature and in the way of exploring the heroine’s feelings. It seems
that the common trend in todays—and even in past—cinema is to probe the
inner world or worlds of female mentality and spirituality, which many still
consider obscure or puzzling!
The
Fifth Reaction:
produced 2003 (Iran)
The
Iranian film participating in the competition—among many non-competition
Iranian movies—also tackles a woman and her suffering. A widow engages in a
fierce conflict with her father-in-law over the custody of her two sons. The
rapid sequence of suspenseful events sheds light on important aspects of
contemporary
Iran
. Some perceive the favoritism the father-in-law enjoys within the police system
versus attempts of the heroine’s female friends to help her out as symbolic of
the cat-and-mouse game between the reformists and conservatives in
Iran
. The movie won the Best Screenplay Award, which reemphasizes the annual habit
of
Iran
reserving a prize in the Cairo Film Festival.
The
King:
produced 2003 (Greece)
That this film won the Golden Pyramid prize—“Best Film Award”—is,
without exaggeration, an astounding surprise! The movie is very commonplace. The
story of a stranger, who emigrates to live in a small town where the
inhabitant’s lives intersect, and whose community rejects the newcomer, is an
overly repeated monotone. The treatment, moreover, is traditional and tedious.
Its screenplay is fragmented and the cast’s performance unexciting.
New Features in this Year
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Claude Chabrol
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This year’s round, the Festival’s administration tried to add new features
and renew older ones on many enterprises:
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The
new tradition of honoring a certain country’s cinema has been introduced
during this year’s round. Bearing in mind the current world events, the
idea that Sherif Al-Shoubashy, this year’s Festival president, enjoys a
Francophonic cultural background and considering the public and official
anti-American French attitude, especially in respect to
Iraq
, we can easily grasp why the cinema of France was chosen to be honored this
year.
The
honoring crystallized in showing too many French movies, about fifty films,
which are reckoned as three times more than the Festival’s competition movies.
Some of them were produced this year, 2003, and some go back to many years ago
in honor of the famous French director Claude Chabrol.
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The
Festival gave plenty of opportunity to the Indian productions of Bollywood—the
Indian cinema city named after the American Hollywood. As Indian cinema has
its own lovers within the Egyptian audience, nine Indian movies of diverse
topics and quality were screened during the Festival. A similar opportunity
was given as well to South Korean cinema. The audience and critics were
exposed to modern Asian cinema. Films of challenging content and high
technology satisfied the diversified audience of an international festival.
However, the attendance did not reach its utmost because the audience of
such cinema is still limited in number, but I hope that it will multiply
over the coming years!
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A
daily German program showing a modern German movie, represented Germany’s assertive presence in the Festival. Many have changed their attitude
toward the German cinema due to the developments in the selection of its
content, in the dramatic treatment and in breaking the fixed stereotyping
that prevailed in German cinema making for decades. One of my friends
exclaimed, “I’m impressed by these modern German movies!” It is
noteworthy to point out that they had been shown during the “German
Festival in Egypt”—October 2 to 23—whose slogan read: “Germany
and Egypt Meet—Culture as a Bridge
of
Dialogue.” It had entertained poetry evening parties, night plays and art
fairs.
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The
Festival’s administration tried to deal effectively and rationally with
the critical situation of accepting or rejecting movies that cause
apprehension, because of either their intellectual content, or the “hot”
scenes they contain. International Festival conventions require that no
censorship against participating films be maintained. The Festival
administration, however, has the right to reject certain films or restrict
their showing to critics and journalists.
This year, the administration rejected about forty movies and the round ran
peacefully. There is, nonetheless, an escalating fear expressed by critics and
concerned specialists that such an equation could only be resolved at the
expense of some important works, which provoked noisy debate and extensive
discussions. The Festival administration, for example, rejected the movie
Irreversible, which several film specialists had been looking forward to seeing
on the big screen.
*This
was the 27th Cairo International Film Festival (7-17 October 2003)
Dr.
Ahmed M. Abdullah is a practicing psychiatrist in Egypt, he is the founder of islamonline.net youth counseling in the Arabic
section. you can reach him at Posta111@yahoo.com
