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Al-Ahram Weekly 5 - 11 August 1999 Issue No. 441 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 5 - 11 August 1999 Issue No. 441
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Focus Interview Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Realistically speaking
By Mohamed El-AssyoutiThe National Festival for Egyptian Cinema (NFEC) has come a long way: it was in 1990, in an attempt by the Ministry of Culture to help the ailing Egyptian film industry, that the ministry's Cultural Development Fund initiated the National Feature Film Festival (NFFF), which aquired its current name in 1995. The NFFF had focused on long features, ignoring documentary, animated and short films. These were the gaps that the NFEC set itself to plug.
Ali Abu Shadi, a distinguished film critic and, since 1996, Chairman of the Egyptian Arts Censorship Board, is the president of this year's fifth NFEC. According to its president "the festival's regulations mean all Egyptian productions made between 1 January and 31 December, 1998 are eligible for the various competitions unless, of course, the makers of a particular film chose not to be considered.
"Out of a total of 21 long feature films produced in 1998 only three declined to be included in the festival: it is, then, something of an open invitation." Such an all embracing approach, however, has its drawbacks. Abu Shadi regrets "the small number of participating films and the fact that this year's 18 feature films compete in more than one competition category." In larger competitions a preliminary vote whittles down the number of nominations in each category so that those with the responsibility for deciding the respective awards (best script, best director, best actor, etc.) need watch only a handful of short-listed films. "At the NFEC," Abu Shadi says, "jury members watch what is virtually the previous year's entire production. Unfortunately, our national production is too limited to allow for the adoption of policies similar to those used in major Western competitions. In the Academy Awards competition, for example, only four per cent of the overall production of American films is selected. Four per cent of Egyptian feature films produced in 1998 would not even amount to one whole film. What are we supposed to do?"
The declared aim of the festival is to support films with good production standards, to encourage creative personnel in the cinematic field and to raise the profile of Egyptian cinema both locally and internationally. It is with these aims in mind, that this year's festival is awarding a total of nine prizes in the documentary, animation and short film section, and a total of 15 prizes in the feature film section, the most significant of which are the golden, silver and bronze prizes for best feature production of the year (worth LE100,000, LE75,000 and LE50,000 respectively).
In an effort to encourage younger filmmakers the directorial debut award category, for which first and second films are eligible, does not preclude the same films' participation in the mainstream competitions, neither does it preclude the film's entry into the best director's category of the competition.
Every year the standard of entries varies, a fact that the competition must accommodate. And Ali Abu Shadi is not alone in his assessment that "since being established nine years ago the competition has yet to surpass the first two rounds, when Mohamed Khan's Supermarket (1990) and Dawoud Abdel-Sayed's Kit Kat (1991) won the top prizes."
The competition, however, he insists, "judges the films that are in competition. We cannot create hypothetical films by wishful thinking and thus avoid the situation in which Egyptian cinema finds itself. I prefer to make comparisons between the films that are actually being screened at the present moment, and not between them and some hypothetical absolute, or better films produced in the past. If we did that we may find ourselves not only withholding some awards but canceling the festival altogether."
