Since it was founded in 1976 by the writer and critic Kamal Al-Mallakh, the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) has garnered the respect and loyalty of cinephiles as well as filmmakers and critics not only in Egypt but wherever in the world attention was paid to the Middle East. For Egyptians October-November became the time to see some of the best art house cinema in the world each year. Though younger than the Carthage Cinematic Days (founded in 1966), the CIFF is the oldest international festival in the Arab world, having been registered with the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF). In recent years two factors have negatively impacted the CIFF: the festival's financial situation has suffered, making it harder to compete with better funded regional events like the Dubai Film Festival; that had been caused in turn by the economic crisis following political turmoil since the 25 January revolution in 2011; the 2012 round, for example, was held while Tahrir Square was closed off, with a sit-in against the Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, while the 2013 was not held following Morsi's ouster. In the last two years, although the festival was held successfully, economic conditions impacting both government spending on the arts and non-governmental grants have prevented it from returning to its former place at the centre of regional cinema. The current dollar crisis for one thing must have affected this year's budget too, yet it should be said that festival president Magda Wassif and artistic director Youssef Cherif Rizkalla have on the whole managed to continue performing the festival's – and any festival's – central task of providing the place where it is held with as many good films made in the previous year from all over the world as possible. Still, this year a film approved by the selection committee was excluded from the programme following an intervention from the censors; in 2012, too the festival administration blocked a number of films that had explicit scenes of sex or violence including Roland Reber's The Truth of Lies (which showed the torture of two naked girls in a German prison) for fear of Islamist prosecution. But the film that was banned this year is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning Egyptian film which the audience will no doubt miss, Tamer Al-Said's fictional debut In The Last Days Of The City, starring the British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla. The festival administration had selected the film for the official competition following its Berlinale screening and requested that its Middle East premiere should be at the CIFF, making Al-Said miss the opportunity to show it in other festivals. According to a statement by the filmmakers, the CIFF administration then suddenly demoted the film to the Arab Horizons section, and when the filmmakers insisted that it should be screened in the competition dropped it altogether. Filmmakers drafted and signed a statement demanding that the film should be reinstated, so did the cultural committee of the Press Syndicate, but the festival programme was published without any mention of it. A disheartening development – but it should not imply that this round's fare, including the opening film, Kamla Abu Zekry's Women's Day, will not be rich, varied and a sign of good things to come.
