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Egyptian emerging filmmakers among AFAC Crossroad project grantees Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) announced six winners of Crossroads funds, including two Egyptians, whose project 'Out/In the Streets' will be funded
In its second batch of grants given to film projects submitted by the artists from the Arab world, six were selected from among 142 submissions. According to AFAC, "the Crossroads Support is AFAC's special fund for emerging directors from the Arab world working on films related to 'possibility' and 'change'." The second batch grantees are Philip Rizk and Jasmina Metwaly from Egypt for the documentary Out/In the Streets, Rifqi Assaf from Jordan for a narrative The Curve, Sara Ishak from Yemen for the documentary Fatherland, Mazen Khaled from Lebanon for the short fiction A Very Dangerous Man, Djemal Fawzy from Tunisia for a short fiction Abruption and Hazem Al-Hamwi from Syria for his documentary, Caravan in a Room. According to Philip Rizk and Jasmina Metwaly, grant winners from Egypt, their Out/In the Streets documentary aims to be part of the struggle of the ongoing Egyptian revolution by engaging with in cinema beyond television or documentary imagery. The film will concentrate on labourers throughout the ongoing Egyptian revolution. "The film mixes the forms of documentary and fiction in order to see the Egyptian revolution from workers' perspective, beyond the factory's heavy gates, beyond the frozen assembly lines and rusty machinery," the filmmakers explain. "As we attempt a different telling of society it is easy to fall into clichés of bourgeois art that either romanticise or fetishes the 'proletariat.' It is our goal to do neither, nor is it our goal to impose our ideologies and analysis on a very complex situation. In our film, the first necessary acknowledgment is a realisation of this layered and complex reality of workers." Egyptian filmmakers are among the second and final batch of grantees to receive Crossroads Support. The first batch was announced in February 2012 and also included six projects, among which two were by the Egyptian filmmakers. A documentary by Mohamed Rashad, The Little Eagles, will look into links and differences between two generations, aspirations and revolutionary hopes of the left-wing activists of the sixties and seventies as well as the children of the nineties. Mohamad ShawkyHassan's experimental visual work titled And on a Different Note, which will be "a reflection on the ambivalent relationship of an Egyptian living in New York City with the ongoing political developments in Egypt and the media rhetoric associated with them." Other first-batch winners are Karima Zoubeir from Morocco for a short narrative Behind the Wall, Bahia Ben Cheikh-El-Fegoun from Algeria for a documentary Algerians, State of Affairs, State of Mind…, and two artists from Lebanon: Fadi Yeni Turk for a documentary Monumentum and Ahmad Ghossein for a feature-length narrative Upside Down. http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/45977.aspx
