Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture

		26 Sept. - 2 October 2002 Issue No. 605 Culture	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Recommend this page

Seaside film
THE 18th ALEXANDRIA Film Festival opened last Wednesday with the Greek filmmaker Maria Lilio's Alexandria. The opening ceremony featured a Cairo Opera House performance of an operetta with lyrics by Abdel- Rahman El-Abnoudi and music by Omar Khairat, directed by Badr El-Zaqaziqi. This year's festival honoured the late novelist Youssef El-Seba'i, filmmaker Ezzeddin Zulfuqar and actor Ahmed Mazhar, each of whose sons received a festival shield. More than 50 films representing 28 Arab and foreign countries will be screened during the festival.
Egyptians in Rome...
A LARGE-SCALE exhibition, held under the auspices of the Egyptian Cultural Centre in Rome and entitled "Egyptian and Italian Women: Dialogue", was inaugurated last Wednesday by Helmi Bedeir, Egypt's new ambassador to Italy. Curated by artist and critic Nagwa El-Ashri, the exhibition includes painting, sculpture, pottery, rugs and graphic art by some 70 artists from Egypt and Italy. The inaugural ceremony was followed by a dinner reception with folk dance performances by Egyptian and Italian troupes. Abdel-Moneim Muawwad, Egypt's cultural attaché, announced that the exhibition aims to highlight historic links between Egyptian and Italian culture.
... and in Johannesburg
THE ASWAN folk dance troupe arrived in Johannesburg last Tuesday as part of an initiative to showcase Egyptian folk dance in several South African cities, particularly those with a high concentration of black people. The troupe is the guest of the South African Ministry of Culture.
As part of the ongoing exchange the Egyptian Embassy in South Africa will organise a travelling exhibition of replicas of ancient Egyptian monuments through the second half of September and onwards.

World children
A MUSEUM of children's art works, featuring contributions from 85 countries, was inaugurated on Tuesday by Abdel-Salam Mahgoub, the governor of Alexandria, who arrived at the 3,200m site in the company of cartoonist Mustafa Hussein. Part of the governorate's Shawnat Al-Fann project, which aims to establish a string of specialised museums in the summer resort of Agami, this museum -- Ishaq Azmi, the Shawnat Al- Fann project supervisor, announced -- shows drawings, paintings and three-dimensional creations in 18 galleries and aimed specifically at children. The museum, Azmi added, benefits from an innovative modular design inspired by geographical diversity: some wings are connected to each other through mini bridges overlooking canals, some the desert, while others are modelled on forest environments.
The museum incorporates spaces for film and performance.
Kinds of aspic
DAR AL-KUTUB last week embarked on three projects aimed at digitalising and preserving its cache of nearly 110,000 documents and manuscripts. Critic Salah Fadl, chairman of the institution, announced that the projects will be undertaken in collaboration with Al-Ahram and the Cabinet Support Centre. The projects provide for the production of CD-Roms to be marketed to researchers and interested parties as well as modernising the filing and classification systems currently in use at the institution.
Upholding copyright
PUBLISHER Ibrahim El-Muallim has been elected a member of the Judges' Council of the Union of Arab Lawyers. El-Muallim's extensive publishing interests will serve him well in representing copyright holders on the international committee charged with handling copyright and intellectual property issues as well as tackling related complications inherent in the digital revolution.
New-deal culture
COMPUTERS are likely to be part of many more people's lives now that Cultural Palaces throughout the country are instituting technology and informatics clubs. Anas El- Fiqi, head of the Egyptian Organisation for Cultural Palaces, signed an agreement last week with Ministry of Communication and Information representative, Akram Abdel- Gawwad, announcing that computing services will be introduced to 16 cultural palaces, to be followed by the establishment of eight cultural sites to be inaugurated before the end of the year, including new, computer- enabled cultural centres in Zagazig, Abu Qurqas, Al-Sibaiya, Biyala and Naj Hammadi. The purpose of the project, according to Abdel-Gawwad, is to eliminate computer illiteracy and to spread information among young people.
September remembered
THE ORIENTAL Hall of the American University in Cairo was the venue for a lecture by economist Galal Amin on the occasion of the first anniversary of the 11 September terrorist attacks, writes Mustafa El-Minshawi. Based largely on his most recent book the lecture advanced the hypothesis that, while the intentions behind the US war on terrorism are to be questioned, the notion of blaming Al-Qa'eda for the attacks emanates largely from a complex, predetermined and fictitious scheme intended to justify Washington's war on terrorism. Referring to Chomsky, Amin accused the media machine of playing far too great a part in current conceptions of world events; the death of a relatively uninteresting woman named Diana, he said by way of example, was turned into an international media feeding frenzy.
Compiled by Youssef Rakha

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