In its 36th round, the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) presented over 200 of the most important — and most recent — films from all over the world. Among them were newly restored works, from the silent cinema and later, many of them landmarks that altered our understanding of the cinematic art. Exhibitions were held alongside the festival screenings, including one celebrating the centenary of the late director Henry Barakat, whose celebrated 1965 film, Al-Haram (The Sin, screened at the Cannes Festival competition upon its release) was part of the CIFF's Classic Features programme. Red, Blue, Yellow, is the name of both a documentary about the Emirati artist Najat Mekki, directed by Nujoum Al-Ghanem, and an exhibition of Mekki's work organised by the festival. As well, eight books published by the CIFF were launched and a symposium on Arab film festivals was held. Though not part of the international competition, the Chinese filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai's Red Amnesia was among the most significant CIFF screenings this year. The film is about a woman in her late sixties who lives in a small apartment in Beijing. Red Amnesia records her daily rituals: going out to her son's apartment to prepare food for him, his wife and their son, a self-imposed duty the wife does not seem to appreciate; doing the same for her younger son, whose lifestyle she disapproves of (it is implied that he is gay); and visiting her own mother at an old people's home, where she tries to feed her. It is clear, through a number of details, that this is a very dry woman whose only capacity for affection are these rituals. The film occasionally shifts to a different set of rituals performed by a teenager, presented somewhat more mysteriously. We see the back of the young man as he showers, but eventually we see him watching television with an icy expression not unlike that of the elderly woman, suggesting they are somehow two sides of the same coin. From the first moments of the film the woman has been dogged by anonymous phone calls, giving the film the edge of a thriller without taking away its essentially realist quality as a drama, until it is revealed that the tension results from something in the past. In the 1960s, when she was a young Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, the woman destroyed a man's future and caused him to lose his family. It is a crime that she is still trying to atone for. The young man is her victim's grandson, and their strange contact, far from leading to any violence or discord, turns out to be part of the process of atonement. In the end, the value of the film is the way in which it sheds light on the Cultural Revolution from a contemporary perspective. Life of Riley was the great French filmmaker Alain Resnais's final film. It received the FIPRESCI award at the Berlinale this year. Life of Riley was screened in the CIFF, along with Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), to honour one of the most pivotal figures in the history of cinema. Resnais's deeply influential work constituted a qualitative leap in the way films were made in France and reverberated across the world. Life of Riley was released in March 2014, when Resnais was still alive. The film was the director's attempt to visually interweave the arts of theatre and cinema, living up to his reputation for bringing potentially controversial innovations to the art of film. Based on Alan Ayckbourn's eponymous play, Alain Resnais's Life of Riley deals with three married couples who stage an amateur play in Yorkshire. The characters are Colin and Kathryn, Jack and Tamara, and George Riley and Monica (the latter couple is divorced and live separately, Monica sharing a house with her farmer boyfriend Simeon. Riley — the supposed subject of the film — remains hidden throughout the action, which takes place in Colin and Kathryn's house, Jack and Tamara's mansion and Monica and Simeon's farmhouse. The film opens with Colin telling Kathryn that their friend Riley is terminally ill and has only six months to live. It is then that they first think of inviting George to take part in their play, something that might improve his spirits. George's presence among his friends will bring both their marriages to the brink of collapse before they settle down again, on a much stronger basis, more stable than ever. Resnais managed to make a film about death that is also a social comedy, using sets that mimic and reflect the theatre stage to somewhat Brechtian but ultimately engrossing effect, and producing frames that resemble Impressionist paintings. Screened as part of the CIFF's newly introduced Critics' Week, curated by the Egyptian Critics' Association, Serbian filmmaker Vuc Rsumovic's No One's Child is based on a true story. It is a powerful statement on the collapse of Yugoslavia and the question of what it means to be savage, and what it means to be civilised. The film opens in 1988. A group of fishermen in a remote part of Bosnia discover a child, no more than ten or eleven, who is completely naked and behaving like a wild animal. With its opening echoing François Truffaut's 1970 L'Enfant Sauvage, the film derives its power from the screenwriter and the director ensuring that every small and apparently inconsequential detail is relevant to the action and the development of the whole drama. Registered, named and moved into an orphanage in Belgrade, the child is unable to fit into his new environment (or indeed human life). This is evident in his teacher's frustration with him and in his blank observation of his surroundings. Several years later, the civil war breaks out. The soundtrack is as meticulously structured as the picture, with a gunshot setting off the action and the muffled sounds of the war reflecting the relative deafness of the combatants. Screened as part of Prospects of Arab Cinema, yet another newly introduced section of the CIFF, Jordanian filmmaker Naji Abu Nowar's Theeb, is set in the Jordanian desert. The film received an award at the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival. Beautifully filmed, with remarkable acting by real-life Jordanian Bedouines, it revolves around a Bedouin boy, Theeb (meaning “wolf”), who is seen herding camels and learning to shoot an old rifle with his older brother. It is only when the tribe is visited by a member of another tribe, accompanied by an English army officer, that we realise the film is set in the time of the Arab Revolt of 1916-18. Theeb offers an alternative perspective on the world of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Theeb goes along with his brother and the other tribesman to lead the English officer to the Ottoman railway in the middle of the desert. On the way, they are attacked by unidentified tribesmen. In the ensuing battle, everyone is killed except for Theeb and a man from the other side. As the two struggle to survive, their anger and distrust gradually turns into a friendship. *** Screened in the Festival of Festivals section, Slovenian filmmaker Sonja Prosenc's The Tree is made up of three chapters, each dedicated to one member of a newly fatherless family that seems to be imprisoned in the family home, the only place that is considered safe. The film opens with nine-year-old Veli (Lukas Matija Rosas Ursic) riding his bicycle; exceptional music by Janes Dovc accompanies the scene. The house is shown in detail, its bare high walls and the yard with nothing in it but a goat and the high door that Veli cannot reach. Veli lives with his mother Milena (Katarina Stegnar) and his older brother Alek (Jernej Kogovsek). Alek appears rather sad and quiet and shows remarkable levels of tolerance for his younger brother, a curious and active boy with an urge to escape those high walls. He is trying to find out what his mother and brother are hiding from him. Prosenc's debut, The Tree, reflects her background in visual production and her attendance at the Berlinale and Sarajevo talent campuses, with the tranquility of presentation sharpening the rising tension in her characters. Only in the second chapter do we accompany Melina and her children out of the house on a trip that reveals the power of Mitja Lincen's cinematography in a new context and illuminates the past. In their small town, the three family members meet Alek's girlfriend and Liri (Sasa Pavlin Stosic), the sister of his best friend, Dritan (Suad Fazli). Alek and Dritan are seen climbing a tree before they start discussing Alek and Liri's relationship in the light of Alek moving out of town. As they talk they start to fight and Alek pushes Dritan out of the tree, killing him. So this is what is keeping the family indoors. The film won awards for Best Actor (Jernej Kogovsek), Best Screenplay (Mitja Licen) and Best Music as well as the Critics Prize for Best Feature at this year's Slovene Film Festival. Through in-depth interviews with Iranian filmmakers, Jamsheed Akrami's A Cinema of Discontent documents how the Islamic Revolution reshaped censorship codes in Iranian cinema after 1979. No woman can appear on screen without the hijab, for example, even if she is portrayed at home sleeping or having a meal with her family. No woman can hug or kiss a man, even she is playing a mother greeting her son after he has been away. With examples of such scenes shown — how a hijab is replaced with a towel in the bathroom, for example, or the daughter turning into a child when her father kisses her on her wedding day — the 2013 documentary explains the filmmakers' often ingenious attempts to sidestep such rules. The absurdity does not stop there: another rule is that women can only sing in movies if their voice is replaced on-screen by a man's. Strangely enough, men and women can touch if they are having a fight. Even animated films are subject to the same rules. Under such circumstances, when they haven't given up on making films altogether, directors like Bahman Farmanara have learned how to appease the censors. He sends in his scripts with the lines he expects them to remove marked in red, which he says helps to keep them away from the rest of the script. The director Rakhshan Bani Etemad borrowed footage from pre-1979 Iran and managed to show a woman dancing and singing in her own voice. Akrami is a film historian. Working on Iranian cinema, including such films as The Lost Cinema (2007), Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the 1979 Revolution (2000) and the short A Walk with Kiarostami (2003), Akrami has managed to include interviews with Jafar Panahi, Asghar Farhadi, Bahman Ghobadi, Reza Mirkarimi, Kamal Tabrizi, Fatemeh Motamed-Arya, Babak Payami, Noureddin Zarrinkelk Sara Nodjoumi. Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán's Sand Dollars, an international competition selection, is set in the Dominican Republic. The film is the fourth collaboration by Cárdenas and Guzmán. The three earlier films were Cochochi (2007), Jean Gentil (2010) and the documentary Carmita (2013). Sand Dollars is the story of an romantic encounter. Noelí (Yanet Mojica) is a promiscuous 20-year-old girl with a fixed routine of taking advantage of tourists on the beaches of the Caribbean to earn money, which she gives to her unemployed boyfriend, Yeremi (Ricardo Ariel Toribio). Anne (Geraldine Chaplin) is the elegant and well-off elderly woman who falls in love with Noelí, staying in a relationship with her for three years. Routinely, Noelí asks her for money, allegedly for her brother, but really for Yeremi. Eventually, as she begins to question Noelí's fidelity, Anne realises that only her money has kept them together. But she continues to deceive herself, promising the girl a visa so she can move back to France with her. When Anne is finally sure of Noelí's relationship with Yeremi, she spends time in her hotel room, mourning the end of their relationship. It is then that Noelí makes one last appearance to confess that she is pregnant and in dire straits. She steals Anne's money and passport while Anne is asleep and leaves her with nothing but a kiss. Challenging every possible stereotype, Chaplin's performance is astounding.
