Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 21 - 27 September 2000 Issue No. 500
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Second best

By Youssef Rakha

Up until Tuesday, six of downtown Alexandria's movie theatres were showing uncensored, at least partly inspired, international fare. Animating the city's screens with over 50 films representing a range of sensibilities and origins, from the former Yugoslavia to Chad, the Alexandria Film Festival (13-19 September) opened last Wednesday with Turkish filmmaker Sinan Cetin's Propaganda, following the last-minute cancellation of Franco Zefirrelli's Tea With Mussolini, after a jury declared it "a vehicle for Israeli propaganda," elucidating its supposedly Zionist intentions. In another context, critics pointed out that the majority of the films shown were of little significance, either having been previously screened and marketed or else submitted to Alexandria because they had failed to be accepted at other film festivals. Alongside the official and Egyptian debut competitions, however, the fact that films competed under the umbrella of a "panorama" of Egyptian, and one of Lebanese, cinema, provided a viewing opportunity if little else.

Clockwise from top: Sinan Cetin's Propaganda; Atef Hatata's Closed Doors; Mohamed Chahine's The Usurer; The Lovers, Nour El-Sherif's directorial debut; Ahmed Atef's Omar 2000

That the festival receives but scant attention outside Egypt seems to reinforce the veracity of the most widely held view of the festival. Despite an annual surge of protestations to the contrary in the national press, the festival is widely perceived as a pale shadow of the Cairo Film Festival -- itself (let the fact not be overlooked) still some distance away from being a truly international festival. Though 22 countries were represented at the Alexandria event, four of these are Arab countries (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Morocco), while few of the world's major filmmaking centres are represented at all. Regardless of quality, the quantitative stress placed on Egyptian cinema seems pointless considering how few Egyptian films have been made in the past decade or so, let alone the last few years. Indeed, one might be justified for feeling that focussing on Egyptian cinema in this way is effectively a celebration of failure.

This, the 16th round, thus held few surprises, though the tendency to grant its coastal counterpart the same rights as the Cairo festival (some reforms were introduced as of the last round) has evidently continued to take root in the backyards of a number of government institutions. Following recent disputes between the two parties, the Ministries of Culture and Information each contributed an extra LE100,000 to the festival budget. But regardless of the figures, a larger budget replaces neither coherent method nor effective curatorial policy, both of which remain lacking in the Alexandria and Cairo festivals, though evidently to a lesser degree in the case of the latter. While some lamented the fate of a formerly cosmopolitan cultural centre, many invoked Alexandria's historical role only as a supportive argument, retorting that a festival founded by the late critic and festival director Kamal El-Mallakh is no mere addendum and not to be regarded as marginal. The last two rounds of the festival, in particular, were called a transformation.

Among the developments that heralded that transformation (occurring either during the last round or with the advent of this one): relocating the screenings to the downtown area and away from the outskirts of the city, the Alexandria festival's original location; a busy seminar schedule ("co-production in the light of the new world order" and "a glimpse into the second capital's artistic future" were two of the topics under discussion by cultural and official figures, film figures, journalists and the public) to take place, along with all formal and informal activities, at Qasr Al-Tadhawuq, in order to unite the festival's fronts, so to speak, placing everything in one, easily accessible place; a significant increase in the amount of prize money available to the festival; and an insufficiently informative and grammatically embarrassing internet site (www.alexandriafilmfestival.com) that nonetheless gives the schedule in full, as well as synopses of the films and their categories, listing jury members, tributes and "regulations." With worthwhile films cancelled on such petty claims, however, one cannot avoid the impression that these developments remain on the surface, obscuring deeper problems.

Honoured were El-Mallakh and the late actor Hussein Riyad, an indispensible fixture of early Egyptian cinema, as well as actors Adel Imam and Yousra, filmmaker Ashraf Fahmi and scriptwriter Mahmoud Abu-Zeid, all of whom are well-established figures who have been honoured repeatedly in the past. That the festival should publish four books dealing with their lives and works is a much appreciated initiative. Yet judging by the sound of the titles (which, each consisting of the name of the figure being tackled and an abstract clause like "national luminary" attached to it, all rhyme with one another), this is unlikely to be a revolution in the genre of critical biography, a literary desert boasting very few Arabic shoots, particularly in the arena of the living. The titles certainly make the four books sound sensational and superficial; and, since none of the writers in question is particularly well-known why, ultimately, should one think otherwise? Likewise it is safe to assume that the fifth book, on Lebanese cinema, is nothing more than a basic reference work.

While pointing to possible faults relating to both the administrative policy of its underlying assumptions, neither the issue of Tea With Mussolini nor the quality of what the festival provides is paramount. Rather, it is the absence of such activities as networking and marketing that cripples the festival industry in this country, restricting the economic and artistic operation of the adjunct "international," wasting an otherwise excellent opportunity for Egyptian and Arab film figures to penetrate into European and American markets, and ultimately keeping the profile of the Egyptian film industry far lower than it might be.

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