A total of seven Egyptian films in all four official competitions of the 40th Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) is a significant improvement on last year, which only included three shorts in the Cinema of Tomorrow competition. This year there is Exterior Night by Ahmed Abdallah Al-Sayed in the International Competition, The Giraffe by Ahmed Magdi in the Critic's Week competition, Kilo 64, a documentary by Amir Al-Shenawi, and Poisonous Roses by Ahmed Fawzi Saleh in the Horizons of New Arab Cinema competition as well as three shorts — Intense Practice to Improve Performance by Yasser Shafei, Experiment: Sorry by Alaa Khaled, and Dark Chocolate by Amr Moussa — in the Cinema of Tomorrow competition. But beyond the excitement of seeing them there are features shared by all seven films. The three long fiction films had world (or European) premieres before participating in CIFF: Poisonous Roses in the Bright Future competition at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Exterior Night at the Toronto and Stockholm film festivals and The Giraffe at the Marrakech International Film Festival. Except for Ahmed Abdallah — who, since the release of his first long feature in 2011 has made another six films — the directors featured in this year's CIFF are participating with their debuts. All four long films were produced by small, independent production companies, whether with post-production support from or not. Exterior Night, is produced by Hassala Films, according to its website “an independent production house was formed in 2010 by a group of independent artists who share the same ideas and thoughts about working in low budget forms to produce long debut projects for talented young artists.” It received support from the Dubai International Film Festival INJAZ fund, the Beirut-based post-production company pixelmob, Canon Inc and the Nogoum FM radio. The same is true of The Giraffe, produced by three small companies — Garage Art, Utaco Digital Film and Fig Leaf Studio — with support from the Abu Dhabi Film Festival SANAD fund and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC). Exterior Night Poisonous Roses is likewise produced by Al-Batriq for Media Production, the company founded by film star Mahmoud Hemeida (who plays the lead) in 1995 together with Red Star for Production and Distribution, a company founded in 2013 that hopes to “to create a bridge between art-house and commercial cinema, creating a milieu in which auteurs and filmmakers are empowered to experiment and tell unique stories that are enjoyed by the majority of moviegoers, without compromising their artistic integrity”, and the internationally focused French company Haut Les Mains. Red Star also contributed to the production of Kilo 64, together with Digital Tales. Expressing markedly different styles and visions, the films all deal with social concerns. Exterior Night is the unplanned journey of a middle-class intellectual, Mo (Karim Kasim), through working-class Cairo in the company of a taxi driver, Mustafa (Sherif Desouki) and a sex worker, Toto (Mona Hala). It features Egyptian pop music — Sherine Abdel-Wahab, for example — as well as street and popular life: restaurants, alleyways and Nile Corniche vendors, and it is Abdallah's search for a way to reach a wider audience without compromising his cinematic integrity. The Giraffe, made by a film and TV actor-turned-director, is a surreal account of a cold winter night in which a number of urelated but converging stories centre on a group of young people beset by confusion and frustrated dreams. Everywhere is deserted, even the public hospital, and the vacuum is full of anxiety. Kilo 64 Reversing the happy-ending entrepreneur's success story documentary, Kilo 64 documents the journey of director Amir Al-Shenawi's brother Wael Al-Shenawi who gave up his career as a pharmacist to start a land-reclamation project, failing to make a profit after three hopeful years of hard work because of market control and the absence of state support. It is hard to tell whether Poisonous Roses is a narrative or documentary feature, although it is qualified as the former. It stars Hemeida and Safaa Al-Toukhi but also features real-life tanners working and telling their stories on the streets of Old Cairo. In his romantic-drama short Dark Chocolate Amr Moussa deals with the difference between the reality of a place — a home — and the way a subject imagines that place. Alaa Khaled's Experiment: Sorry centres on a time machine the protagonist manages to use to make up with his girlfriend who died in a bus crash right after they had an argument — only to discover that time moves in one direction after all. The long, boring title of the comedy Intense Practice to Improve Performance, according to its director Yasser Shafei, reflects the life of the company employees whose life it deals with.
