24 - 30 May 2001
Issue No.535
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 May 2001 Issue No.535 |
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In from the cold
The closing ceremony of the 54th Cannes Film Festival -- a large-scale event described as "a festival unto itself" and featuring, among others, British actress Charlotte Rampling and Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, head of the jury -- closed Sunday. (See awards below)Critics pointed out that of the 450 or so films screened in the festival, only one might be described as Arab. But Tunisian film-maker Mohamed Ghorbal's Fatma -- screened in the Director's Fortnight, it won the International Confederation for Art and Experimentation award -- is a French production. Two Egyptian features were submitted for screening and rejected this year: Mohamed Khan's Ayyam El-Sadat (The Sadat Days) and Magdi Ahmed Ali's Asrar El-Banat (Girls' Secrets).
It was announced in the course of the festival that Youssef Chahine's upcoming feature, Sukout Hansawwar (Silence, We're Shooting!) had met the same fate as the two aforementioned films. Misr El-Alamiya -- Chahine's production company -- has since pointed out that the film, which remains incomplete, was never in fact submitted for screening.
AWARDS
Palme d'Or: The Son's Room by Italian film-maker Nanni Moretti (Italy)
Grand Prix of the Jury: The Piano Player by Michael Haneke (Austria)
Best Actress: Isabelle Huppert for The Piano Player (France)
Best Actor: Beno”t Magimel for The Piano Player (France)
Best Director (ex aequo): Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There (USA) and David Lynch for Mulholland Drive (USA)
Best Screen Play: Danis Tanovic for No Man's Land (Bosnia)
Technical Prize: Tuu Duu-Chih for Millennium Mambo and Ni Nei Pien Chin Tien (Taiwan)
Caméra d'Or: Antanrjuat and The Fast Runner by Zacharias Kunuk (the first Inuit film ever)
SHORT FILM
Palme d'Or: Been Cake by David Greenspan (Japan)
Jury Prize: Pizza Passionata by Kari Juusonen (Japan)
Special Jury Prize: Daddy's Girl by Irvine Allan (Scotland)
CINEFONDATION AWARDS
1st prize: Portrait by Sergei Luchishin (Ukraine)
2nd prize: Reparation by Jens Jonsson (Sweden)
3rd prize (ex aequo): Run Away by Yang Chao (China) and Crow Stone by Alicia Duffy (UK)
Mummy approved
Hollywood blockbuster The Mummy Returns, a sequel to The Mummy, was approved by the censor last week, even though the latter was banned, reports Hanan Sabra. The Mummy, the censor said, "includes dialogue and scenes that denigrate ancient Egyptian history."
This time round a committee of public figures was set up, including Egyptologist Zahi Hawwas, critic Sami Khashaba, writer Osama Anwar Okasha, director Kamal El-Sheikh and former ambassador Abdel-Raouf El-Reedi. And while the general tenor might suggest that The Mummy Returns has the same faults as its predecessor, committee members evidently felt that banning it would accomplish nothing beyond reducing box-office returns and possibly upsetting film viewers.
Khashaba found the film "depressing" and "full of historical and geographical mistakes," while El-Reedi insisted that such films should be shot on location, "at least to avoid glaring mistakes."
"Why ban a film in Egypt when we know it is being screened everywhere else?" El-Sheikh told Al-Ahram Weekly. "People will start smuggling it into the country to watch it."
"We are not the guardians of audience taste," Madkour Thabet, the head censor, told the Weekly. "To force certain films on the audience and deprive them of others -- especially when the films in question deal with religion and sex -- is not something we want to do." Thabet, who said nothing of The Mummy, added that The Mummy Returns is a fantasy that has no bearing on our knowledge of ancient Egypt.
Hawwas agreed: "Egyptian history is taught in schools all over the world, foreigners find out about our history in books, so this film is unlikely to affect their judgment." He added that Egypt should endeavour to produce informative films that accurately depict the realities of life in ancient Egypt. Films like Youssef Chahine's Al-Muhager, he said, "are not accurate enough."
New palace residents
After a three-month hiatus, the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces (GOCP) resumed its publishing activities this week.
Mohamed Ghoneim -- appointed chairman of GOCP after Ali Abu-Shadi was dismissed due to the controversy surrounding the publication of three allegedly pornographic novels in GOCP's Aswat Adabiya (Literary Voices) book series at the end of last year -- is said to have spent the interim persuading GOCP's new band of editors to accept the positions he was now offering them. The process was complicated, Ghoneim told the press, by the fact that the four editors of GOCP's book series resigned to protest the banning of the three novels.
In place of novelist Gamal El-Ghitani, who edited Al-Zakhair (the series that publishes low-cost editions of classical canonical works), GOCP appointed Mahmoud Fahmi Hegazi, a well-known classicist and the former chairman of the Egyptian National Library. Abdel-Moneim Tellima, professor of modern Arabic literature at Cairo University, replaced novelist Mohamed El-Bisatie as the editor of the Aswat Adabiya series (dedicated to contemporary literature), while Mohamed Zakariya Enani, another literature professor at Alexandria University, replaced Ibrahim Aslan at the head of Afaq Al-Kitaba (Horizons of Writing), now renamed Afaq Arabiya (Arab Horizons), which focuses on Arabic works from outside Egypt. And Ahmed El-Hadari, a prominent film critic and founder of the 1960s Egyptian cineclubs, took over from film critic Kamal Ramzi, who edited the GOCP book series dedicated to cinema.
Other developments include establishing two more series concerned with informatics and science. They will be edited by Nabil Ali and Ahmed Shawqi, respectively.
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