The second Italian film festival closed last week. Mohamed El-Assyouti reports on the cinema-related activities of the Italy-Egypt cultural year One of the many achievements of the bilateral cooperation agreement reached by Egyptian and Italian presidents Hosni Mubarak and Carlo Ciampi was to name this year (December 2003- December 2004) an Egypt-Italy cultural year. The year was launched with a performance of A Sculptor's Dream by the Egyptian modern dance troupe directed by Walid Aouni at the Quirino Theatre in Rome on 11 December. Since then, various Cairo venues, including the Italian Cultural Centre and the Cairo Opera House, have hosted lectures and exhibitions demonstrating Egyptian-Italian and Italian-Egyptian influences in various cultural spheres. Numerous publications on consolidating Egyptian-Italian ties have also appeared. The goodwill behind the Italiaegitto cultural exchange project has so far been evident most clearly in the field of cinema -- not surprisingly given that in the heyday of Egyptian cinema, in the 1940s and 1950s, many filmmakers working in Egypt were Italian. This goodwill is apparent, as First Secretary for Foreign Cultural Affairs Sherif El-Choubachi told Al-Ahram Weekly, in the fact that among the cultural cooperation agreements that Italy and Egypt have signed this year is one that will work towards increasing the distribution of Egyptian films in Italy and of Italian films in Egypt. Last December's first Italian film festival, which took place at the Ministry of Culture's Artistic Creativity Centre, included press conferences with acclaimed director Pupi Avati, who is also head of Italy's international cinema production company Cinecitt� Holding (SPA), and with celebrated actress Maya Sansa, star of Marco Bellocchio's Buongiorno notte (Goodmorning Night). Throughout the week numerous recent Italian films were screened, including Buongiorno notte, Avati's Il cuore altrove (The Heart Elsewhere), Nanni Moretti's La stanza del figlio (The Son's Room) and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi's two Emmy Award-winning TV opera productions, Tosca nei luoghi e nei tempi di Tosca and La Traviata a Parigi (Tosca in the Places and Times of Tosca and La Traviata in Paris). Last week's second Italian film festival, 11-17 May, which also took place at the Artistic Creativity Centre, saw the screening of films mainly representing neorealism and comedy trends in Italian cinema: Roberto Rossellini's Roma citt� aperta (Rome Open City, 1945), Elio Petri's Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigations of a Citizen above all Suspicions, 1970), Lina Wertmèller's Mim" metallurgico ferito nell'onore (The Wounded Honour of the Worker Mimi, 1972) and Ettore Scola's La Terrazza (The Chamber, 1980). The film week opened with a press conference with Italian Ambassador Antonio Badini, Director of the Italian National Film Archives Angelo Libertini, Director of the Italian Culture Institute in Cairo Adelia Rispoli, Director of the Cairo Opera's Creativity Centre Ahmed Mahfouz and film critic Essam Zakariya. Badini touched on mid-20th century Italian and Egyptian interest in the realist mode, citing as examples the neorealismo movement in Italy, Naguib Mahfouz's novels and Salah Abu Seif's films. Zakariya commented on the influence of the early works of realism in Italian cinema on Abu Seif, pointing out that Abu Seif's first film, Lak Yom Ya Zalim (Tyrant, You'll Have Your Day), produced in the late 1930s, was based on the same Emile Zola novel that was adapted in Roberto Danesi and Martoglio Nino's Sperduti nel buio (Lost in the Dark, 1914). Elaborating on some of the instances of Italian-Egyptian cinematic collaborations, Zakariya noted that Abu Seif's Al-Saqr (The Hawk, 1940) was an Italian co-production and that Roberto Rossellini, which most consider as the first neorealist director, gave his support to the production of Shady Abdel-Salam's Al-Mumiaa (The Night of Counting the Years) when he visited Egypt in the 1960s. Hossameddin Mustafa's 1970s Al-Rusasa la Tazal fi Gaybi (The Bullet is Still in my Pocket), considered the biggest Egyptian war film ever produced, moreover, would not have been possible without Italian input. Though many moot points were raised at the press conference, some mention of Frederico Fellini's influence on Youssef Chahine, or of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up on Mohamed Khan's Darbit Shams (Sun Stroke, 1980), would have made for interesting discussion. At the end of the press conference, Badini and Libertini said that since the Cairo Film Festival's next round will be focussing on Italian cinema, they anticipated a deepening of Italian-Egyptian cultural ties in the field of film. Ginella Vocca, the president of MedFilm Festival Onlus, which organised the two Italian film weeks, told the Weekly that during the course of the first week meetings between representatives of both countries' ministries of culture were held, and agreements aiming to consolidate cultural exchanges were reached. "We will have more opportunities for intense, in-depth and frequent film culture exchanges in the future, including at the level of film production," Vocca said. "We feel that Egypt, culturally speaking, is ready to function as a bridge between Italian culture and other southern Mediterranean, as well as Arab, countries."
