Will this year's Cairo International Film Festival, scheduled to open next Tuesday, manage to put the event back on the international map? Hani Mustafa weighs the odds The Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) has come a long way since it was established in the summer of 1976 as a modest event initiated by the Egyptian Association of Film Writers and Critics headed by Kamal El-Mallakh. In 1985, the late Saad El-Din Wahba, the prominent Egyptian playwright and head of the General Union of Artists, became the head of the festival and set himself the task of turning what was then a local and regional event into one that would have an international standing. Wahba's first step was to contact the Paris- based Fedération International des Associations de Producteurs de Films (FIAPF), which regulates the world's international film festivals. One year later, Wahba's efforts paid off, and the Cairo festival was recognised as an internationally accredited festival, first on a non- competitive basis, and then, from 1991 onwards, as a festival having an official competition and enjoying a similar status to other leading international festivals, such as those in Venice, Cannes and Berlin. While the CIFF did not manage to become an international event able to compete with other world-class festivals, official status notwithstanding, it did succeed in becoming the top Middle Eastern festival in the 1990s, and it gained a reputation for hosting numerous cinema stars and having a real impact on third- world cinema. Despite this period of relative success, over the last ten years or so, particularly after the death of Wahba who presided over the festival for 12 years, the festival has begun to go into a decline. Wahba was succeeded by actor Hussein Fahmi, then by journalist Cherif El-Shoubashy, and then by actor Ezzat Abu-Aouf, who was appointed CIFF president in 2006. While Fahmi and Shoubashy apparently got embroiled in so many bureaucratic hurdles that they decided to throw in the towel, Abu- Aouf continues bravely to try to restore something of the festival's battered reputation, a particularly difficult task at a time when other festivals in the Middle East have entered the competition for influence and have greater financial resources. One such is the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, which, held last month, now boasts the biggest cash prizes in the history of cinema. The Dubai Film Festival, scheduled next month, is another example of a lavish Middle Eastern festival with the kind of budget that the Cairo event can only dream of. Then there are the smaller-scale events in Carthage, Marrakech, Tehran and Damascus, which, despite their narrower focus, are nonetheless able to compete with the Cairo festival because of their more tightly defined objectives and better organisation. The Fajr Film Festival in Tehran, for example, has set itself the objective of promoting Iranian films in the West, and thus it mainly invites film distributors able to achieve this task. Similarly, the Carthage and Marrakech film festivals are working hard to market North African cinema internationally, while the Damascus film festival is the venue of choice for pan-Arab filmmakers and for films that have a political message close to that of the Syrian regime. Unlike these more narrowly defined Middle Eastern festivals, the Cairo festival has always had much wider ambitions, and it has aimed to be not so very different from other international festivals, wherever they may be in the world. Its primary aim is to showcase major trends in world cinema. For many years, the main cinemas in Cairo would screen the festival films for the duration of the festival, hopefully raising public awareness of the art of cinema. And, as is the aim of the other international festivals, the Cairo event aims to make the city in which it is held a capital of cinema in its own right. While it has never had the international profile of Cannes or Berlin, the Cairo event has always aimed to make its host city at least a capital of third-world cinema. This is a noble aspiration, but it is also one that has stumbled over many obstacles, some of which it has never managed to overcome. During the 1990s the Cairo International Film Festival also began to play an important international role in presenting Egypt abroad. This was the decade in which the country was hit by a series of terrorist attacks, many of them on tourists, by members of militant Islamist groups, and this had serious effects on the Egyptian tourist industry. The Cairo festival became a way of restoring international faith in the country, with the presence of well-known celebrities such as Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, Peter O'Toole, Christopher Lee, Irene Pappas, Marcello Mastroianni, Elia Kazan, Oliver Stone, Carlos Saura, Ismail Merchant and Michelangelo Antonioni at the festival being a boost for tourism and for the reputation of Egypt abroad. There is nothing wrong with the festival playing this role. However, sometimes it has seemed as if the festival as a whole has been taken over by this subsidiary aim at the expense of its primary role of showcasing the best international films. The festival has thus become less a cultural festival aimed at a wide audience and more a restricted event confined to a few five-star venues. In addition, and to add to the festival's woes, by the early 1990s the Egyptian film industry was beginning to suffer from problems from which it has perhaps never fully recovered. From being an industry that used to produce over a hundred films a year, by the 1990s the number and quality of films produced had entered a period of decline. Today, the CIFF organising committee has what are rumoured to be huge problems finding any Egyptian films worthy of being entered in the official competition. This year, for example, it was hoped that Ahmed Maher's The Traveller, a large state- financed production, would be finished in time to be entered in the international competition. Unfortunately, Maher and his Italian cinematographer Marco Onorato are still working on the final editing of the film, and it is not expected to be ready until the beginning of next year. As a result, only one Egyptian film, Ismail Murad's The Day we Met, is in the international competition. However, in addition to this main competition the CIFF also holds two others, the Arab Film Competition and the Digital Film Competition, and four Egyptian films have been entered in these two categories. Problems of the ailing Egyptian cinema industry notwithstanding, and even with the decline in the status of the CIFF, this year's event is an occasion for all Egyptian cinema fans to see films that commercial cinemas do not screen and to enjoy the presence of the many acclaimed actors and directors invited by the CIFF. This year's festival will be honouring seven international guests: the American actress Susan Sarandon, the British actress Julia Ormond, the Spanish actress Angela Molina, the South African singer Yvonne Chaka Chaka, the American actress Goldie Hawn, the American actor Kurt Russell and the Mexican director Arturo Ripstein.
