Arab tunes THE 14TH ROUND of the Arabic Music Festival opens on 18 November at the Cairo Opera House. A ten-day event, this year's round will host several prominent Arab musicians and singers including Safwan Al-Bahlawan from Syria, Fouad Zabadi and Karima Al-Saqali from Morocco, Mohamed Abduh from Saudi Arabia, Mohamed Zabadi and Loutfi Boushnaq from Tunisia, and Jihad Aql from Lebanon, as well as Egyptian singers Hani Shakir, Mohamed Tharwat, Medhat Saleh and Amal Maher. An operetta about the life and work of the late Egyptian singer Laila Mourad is scheduled for the opening night of the festival. The libretto is the collaborative effort of Ratiba El-Hefni, renowned Egyptian musicologist and director of the Arabic Music Festival, and poet Bahaa Jaheen; and the show is directed and choreographed by Abdel-Moneim Kamel, director of the Cairo Opera House. On the more scholarly arena, a number of seminars will focus on the role of the violin in Arabic music composition. Film festival AFTER a two-hour meeting of the two of them, Cairo Governor Abdel Azim Wazir and Cherif El-Choubashi, Cairo International Film Featival (CIFF) director, had determined the outline of this year's round of the festival -- to open on 29 November. El-Choubachi declared that the aim of the meeting was to discuss the procedures to ensure effective organisation and use the opportunity to promote Cairo as a tourist destination -- through the publication of booklets advertising the city's cultural and artistic as well as tourist attractions. This year, he asserted, more facilities will be available, with, am�ong other things, two huge water screens displaying the festival programme on the banks of the Nile, and the flags of participating countries will decorate the route from the Cairo International Airport to the festival headquarters. Heralding the inauguration and closing of the event are fireworks and troupes of young actors wearing masks scattered around Cairo and stationed at cultural and tourist landmarks. Camera and the text BY WAY of the Cairo launch of the Italian cultural week -- celebrated all over the world towards the end of October -- last week, the Italian Cultural Centre saw five high-profile speakers addressing a range of issues in Italian cinema and literature. In "Dante superstar", Dante specialist and Avvenire newspaper writer Bianca Garavelli discussed representations of the Florentine poet in recent American films -- David Fincher's Seven (1995), Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come (1998) and Ridely Scott's Hannibal (2001) -- arguing that the figure of the poet is utilised as a dramatic effect to evoke fear; hence the predominence of infernal and purgatorial references. For his part Lorenzo Buccella of l'Unità newspaper investigated schools in the narratives and cinema of D Starnone and D Luchetti -- highlighting differences between teachers trapped in the institution and students passing through -- while Giuseppe Iannaccone of the Rome III University cited the poetry of Leopardi and Pasolini in praise of football's physical prowess and on rebellion against rigid social codes and morality. Flaviano Masella of the TV station Rai News 24 discussed the journey of Ammaniti's book Io non ho paura (I'm Not Afraid) from print to screen, emphasising how the syntax of the novelist and the camera style of the filmmaker both endeavoured to represent the world from the point of view of the child protagonist. Enrico Brizzi, author of the best-selling novel Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo (Jack Frusciante Went out of the Group) -- first published in Italy in 1994, now available in translation in 24 countries -- spoke about the cinematic adaptation of his work, and his love-hate relationship with the cinema. Dream making, Egyptian style A SCREENING programme organised by the American University in Cairo's Performance and Visual Arts Department at the Jameel Centre features a choice of recent Egyptian productions. On Tuesday 8, at 7.00pm, Yousry Nasrallah's Al-Madina (The City, 2000) is the story of Ali, a resident of Rod Al-Farag neighbourhood, who, seeking his fortunes in Paris, ends up as a rigged fight boxer. Of his film Nasrallah says, "Al-Madina, of course, is a place, and it's about what you bring into that place. Who are you? A lot of people think that just because you're born in a place you've inherited a relationship to this place. I don't think so. The relationship between people and places, like that between people among themselves, is something that needs constant reinvention, nourishment, renewal." A remarkable take on life, the film was praised by the late Edward Said, "This is not a film delivering local colour, nor is it about a particularly Arab/Egyptian predicament, nor is it explicable in socio-economic or ethnographic terms of the sort that would take such things as globalisation and the Third World into account. All of these elements are there of course -- it is the story of a young Egyptian lower-middle class man who wants to be an actor -- and its language, images, and manner are obviously Egyptian. Yet its appeal and the level of its aesthetic existence assume a much larger and more universal audience as well as a far greater ambition and reach. Most important, the appeal of the film is filmic, so to speak, and not dependent on cultural explanations that are required to understand or in some way excuse and explain it by some special code... "Part of the film's force is that its reflections on identity -- acting, authenticity, gender, sexuality -- are complex but never misleading or dishonest, never prudish or elusive. It is a film about male relationships, partly homoerotic, partly not, and this dimension is integrated with great skill into the larger question of where, in a globalised and uncertain world, one is, where one can be, and how."
