As a new round of the Alexandria Film Festival opens Youssef Rakha listens to its reluctant new president The 19th Alexandria International Film Festival (3-9 September) opened yesterday with Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Uzak, described at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where it received two awards, as an intimate account of the voyage of two men across a snowy contemporary Istambul. According to filmmaker and Film Institute professor Mohamed El-Qalyoubi, this round's president, the quality of the opening feature is typical of this year's festival. An invariably unhappy administrator, the energetic, middle-aged director is as enthusiastic about the present round -- the programming, he insists, has reached unprecedented heights --as he is dismissive of the history of the event, "an inadequately funded event of ill repute" that in the last two decades, he confesses, he only attended twice, in 1994 and again, as member of the jury, in 1997. But El-Qalyoubi has no scruples about proclaiming the present round in the most laudatory tones. Nor does he shy away from delineating the importance of his role, or describing his initial reluctance to undertake it. "This is my first time as president of the Alexandria Festival, yes, my first time as president of any festival. When Abdel-Hayy Adib first approached me about it," he recounts, "I said no. Then I received a call from Mamdouh El-Leithi. I responded in the same way. Afterwards Ahmed El-Hadari called, and my old Alexandria Group friends waged a serious campaign to persuade me to do it. So I eventually yielded, and for the second time became entangled in the misfortune of an official post." (Of the first time, El-Qalyoubi's two-year tenure as head of the National Centre for Cinema, he retains some of the "unhappiest memories" of his life.) "I became the president of a festival with which I had absolutely no connection." His knowledge of the event, he insists, was gleaned from newspapers and hearsay. Founded by Kamal El-Mallakh, who also founded the Cairo Film Festival, the Alexandria Festival quickly became a contender for funds and attention, El- Qalyoubi explains. There soon emerged a spirit of competitiveness, not interdependence -- an unfortunate part of the legacy of film festivals in Egypt. As the Cairo Festival became a Ministry of Culture activity, the Alexandria Festival quickly lost support; and to this day, El-Qalyoubi remonstrates, the Cairo Festival receives 10 times more funding than its Mediterranean counterpart. Of El-Mallakh's offspring, the latter, which landed in the hands of the less powerful Association of Film Writers and Critics, remains the disinherited sibling. Never mind that El-Qalyoubi has been an active member of the aforementioned association for many years: the history of the festival was far from encouraging. "There are two things I like to do in my life: teaching rebellious young adults cinema, and directing or writing my own work," the director goes on. "Holding a post is always a full-time job. I had to stop filming a televised drama, Ba'd Al- Toufan (After the Storm), to free my time for the festival. It's a full-time administrative job, and as such it's terribly exhausting. There is no prestige to it, from my own point of view, no particular pleasure or reward worth that kind of effort." Yet to listen to him the effort is far from being wasted. El-Qalyoubi's aversion to administration is one thing, the particular challenges of the event another. "Samir Farid, for one, warned me against accepting the post," he explains, "saying the festival had the worst reputation in the world. There turned out to be all kinds of problems with all kinds of parties. At the time I didn't realise that the National Festivals Committee had withdrawn confidence in the festival, ceased to recognise it, which means you cannot legitimately receive funding from any relevant institution in Egypt or elsewhere. No support." Enter the Soviet-educated rebel: "I strove after regaining that confidence, initially. It was a necessary first step. And afterwards I used my connections from all over the world to give the event the massive thrust it required. The Greek Film Centre, for example, had boycotted the festival following an embarrassing little episode on the opening night last year when the entire audience, including filmmakers and critics, scurried off to the buffet once the screening was over, leaving the acclaimed filmmaker alone to weep in the auditorium. "Thankfully we have reestablished our links with this and other institutions. We received reasonable support, very good funding, from all over the world. And I want to acknowledge Minister Farouk Hosni's contribution in this context, too: he sanctioned a significant increase in the grant received from the Ministry of Culture, which is evidence of the trust he places in us." Why all this exertion, considering El-Qalyoubi's view of the festival and his position on administrative work? "When you see an event in Egypt that has been going on for 17 years and is about to stop," El- Qalyoubi responds, "you do all that you can in order to prevent that from happening. And then," he adds, "once you accept a responsibility, you have to live up to it." And living up to it is largely the subject of this conversation: "The first thing I did was get rid of all vestiges of ill-reputed Egyptian curating. I categorised the awards according to international standards, now there are fewer awards, a fixed number to be handed out according to international conventions. No last-minute revisions or awards made up specifically in order not to displease local figures. There are things that might seem unimportant, superficial, but I found them unbearable. The festival shield, for example, which was designed by Salah Abdel-Kerim, used to be cast in aluminium -- no doubt it was cost-effective to do it that way, and you could hand out as many as you liked. Now we are casting only the essential few in bronze, if only out of respect for the artists. No more aluminium... "For the first time in the history of this festival, the programme was drawn up not haphazardly, through casual exchanges with the relevant embassies, but painstakingly selected and contacted directly. I don't like amateurs so I gathered a group of professional curators and for many weeks we made contact with everyone, seeking out acclaimed films for the panorama, and the most important Mediterranean productions for the official competition. And the same goes for the jury: they are all respected figures. And we didn't just happen upon their names as we browsed away on the Internet. We sought them out. A frenzied effort, this, with people losing lots of sleep, but I think we succeeded." Russian filmmaker Gennadi Poloka's Return of the Battleship (Poloka is also chairman of the jury), Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzeid's Arayis Al-Tin (Clay Dolls) and Afghan filmmaker Seddiq Mubarak's Usama, as well as the world premiere of Syrian filmmaker Nabil El-Maleh's digital production, Gharamiyat Najla (Najla's Amorous Adventures) are all included in the programme. And the other members of the jury -- Syrian filmmaker Ghassan Kosa, German filmmaker Roland Reber, Egyptian cameraman Ramsis Marzouq indicate that, frenzied or otherwise, an effort was made. Included, too, is a programme of French films, many Maghreb entries, a "midnight surprise" programme, a script-writing workshop and a full-scale symposium on Mediterranean cinema in the age of globalisation. "I think we may even have formed a cadre of experienced young curators," El-Qalyoubi says, "because, you know, there is this generation that got stuck in Egypt's throat." Notwithstanding the pace at which preparations were being made at the Association headquarters or possibility of problems arising -- as of last Saturday five features, including Poloka's, had been rejected by the censors, an obstacle El-Qalyoubi seemed certain head censor Madkour Thabet would remove -- El-Qalyoubi worries only about one thing. "Organisation. We are, as you know, a chaotic people. So never mind these censorship hiccups: these people are outside history, and they could have told us they objected to the films before we sent out invitations and bought plane tickets. As I see it the main problem is that we're a chaotic people. I can devote myself totally to organising the festival but I can't work as an impresario or an airport pick-up service, and in this country you never know. At the Cairo Film Festival, when they had the star of The Bold and the Beautiful on stage, one audience member went up and made him repeat the Muslim shahada in the microphone, on air. At the Ismailia Festival everything had gone as planned until the last minute when they were about to announce the awards: the piece of paper on which 'the results' had been written down could not be found. That kind of thing can happen, and does. "But I am confident that we have done everything in our power to breathe life into the event. Whether or not it succeed, though, depends equally on efficient logistics, sensible behaviour and sound organisation. And it is the lack of such qualities, I fear, that might deal the 19th Alexandria Festival a fatal blow."
