Four years ago film lovers in Egypt, with the exception of films from the Maghreb, knew little of African cinema, their experience restricted to what few films the curators of the Cairo and Ismailia festivals annually selected. In 2012 the Shabab Independent Foundation managed to establish a festival in Luxor specialising in African cinema, the Luxor African Film Festival (LAFF) which has since become a yearly forum for African filmmakers. In the last three rounds, what is more, on the initiative of screenwriter Sayed Fouad and director Azza Al-Husseini – the president and director of the festival, respectively – workshops and training courses in which numerous young artists participated were held. Directed by the Ethiopian-American filmmaker Haile Gerima, they would start days before the festival and continue on its fringe. In its fourth round (16-21 March), the LAFF opened with Abderrahmane Sissaco's Timbuktu, which was screened in the official competition of the Cannes Festival this year and recently earned a Cesar award in France. It is an innovative retelling of the lives of women in the most important desert city in west Africa, in Mali, which has turned from a multiethnic cultural hub into an Al Qaeda centre. Sissaco registers the day-to-day details through many local characters, communicating his message from the first scene in which a delicate deer is running in the desert, closely followed by a four-wheel drive manned by Al Qaeda fighters who are shooting at it. One fighter is heard warning the others that, rather than simply killing the deer, they should exhaust and terrify it. The innovative screenplay, rather than depending on a linear plot, is rather a pastiche of sketches connected only by their setting, which the film beautifully evokes together with following the fortunes of a young Tuareg family and the Al Qaeda leader Abdel-Kerim, who fancies the wife. In a black comedy mould, the film depicts mainly the Islamist fighters' treatment of the local residents: the prohibitions they impose on smoking and music. The Islamists try to have one man fold up his trouser legs so that they would be in the Wahhabi style; the fabric is too soft to fold, however, so the man takes off his trousers altogether and walks around in his underwear. Considering the extent of human wealth and variety on the continent, it is only to be expected that African cinema should vary widely in content and form. While some African films are at an early stage of cinematic development, however, others – like Andy Seige's Beti and Amare, which won the festival's bronze Nile award – are powerful accomplishments. The film opens with documentary footage of Italy's occupation of Ethiopia under Mussolini in 1936. A girl escapes the war to the wilderness where she lives with her grandfather in a wooden hut, making the potent statement on her way that life has become black and white, and the photography draws on this idea by mixing black-and-white with colour imagery in a deeply sensitive way. The girl is seen helping her elderly grandfather, registering the details of day-to-day life in the hut and the extreme weather of the wilderness: her daily journey to the spring to obtain water, for example. The film also shows the grandfather's coldness to the girl and the harassment to which she is subjected by three young men on horseback who eventually rape her. The director focuses on the mythical and the symbolic alongside his depiction of the grit and grain of life, with a naked boy emerging out of a stone egg that apparently falls from the sky whom the girl takes in and raises, turning him into a human monster with which to take revenge on her rapists in time. The political dimension present in many of this year's fiction films is even more pronounced in documentary features, with the South African director Rehad Desai's Miners Shot Down – screened in the context of the documentary feature competition – using extensive interviews with eyewitnesses to document the Marikana Miners Strike massacre in August 2012, when the police killed 34 miners and wounded 78 others while trying to remove their sit-in. The film opens with footage of the massacre, moving onto investigative research of the details preceding the event and revealing how numerous state figures were implicated. Indirectly the film presents the conflict between the the workers and the capitalists that causes the workers to strike in the first place. No doubt the filmmakers manage to endorse the issue they present using shots and video footage from sources including police and the company security cameras. Another film that is overtly political is another competition documentary, the Tunisian director Abdalla Yahya's On This Land, which takes its name from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's famous poem, “On this land there are things worth living for” and set in a village outside the capital where the population is marginalised and dispossessed. It is the village that provided the first martyr of the 14 January Revolution. The issue that the film focuses on is that of young revolutionaries detained since they insisted on their right to work. It opens with a village sit-in in which the detainees' elderly parents and young children are calling for their release. Evoking the setting, and revealing the indigence of its inhabitants, the film moves onto a survey of the villagers' opinions on the social and political conditions in their village, interspersed with images of the train that speeds through the village without stopping. They are taken from a height and symbolise these citizens' isolation from the city and the powers that be in Tunis, something that is spelled out in a statement by one of the elderly men, who says no official has entered the village since independence from the French. This leads into discussions of conflict with the occupation authorities prior to independence. Other films dealing with the Arab Spring include the Egyptian filmmaker Abanob Nabil's six-minute The Tea Cart, which was screened in the short films competition, deals with the Egyptia revolution with subtlety and simplicity. Beautifully filmed to evoke the noir setup, the film comprises the scene of a young man walking around narrow alleyways at night, obviously scared of something. He stops at a tea cart managed by an elderly man who is accompanied by a brutal-looking man. As the young man approaches the tea cart owner picks up an iron chain in anticipation of an attack, which the young man dispels by asking for a glass of tea and sitting in between the owner and his companion to drink it. At the same time he begins to look through his smart phone for a the video of a demonstration that generates an abortive conversation between the cart owner and the young man about revolutionaries and thugs. Thugs eventually show up looking for demonstrators, and the tea cart owner denies the presence of any demonstrators when he is asked. With brilliant acting performances, the film ends with the brutal-looking man stealing the young man's phone, which appears in the frame while the young man is no longer there. *** The LAFF has introduced the Freedoms Competition, the only section which deals with films of a political nature from all over the world. The award is in the name of the journalist Al-Husseini Abu-Daif, who was killed on 25 December 2012 in the course of demonstrations against the Muslim Brotherhood. And among the most important films to be screened in this competition is Paul Cown and Amer Shomali's Palestinian documentary The Wanted 18, about the West Bank village of Bait Sahour during the Palestinian Intifada in 1987, when the general strike that began in Bait Sahour spread to the rest of the West Bank. The film depends on the memories of villagers who were young men in the 1980s discussing their unique experiment. In one ingenious step, for example, they bought 18 cows from Israel with the object of providing the entire village with milk to replace the Israeli company. The film combines stop motion with footage and still photography as well as interviews to document the Israeli siege of the village with irony and humour, ameliorating the tragedy of actual events.
