Egyptian filmmaker Saad Hendawy is heartened by the Arab entries in this month's Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival The 30th Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, which closed in the French city earlier this month, is one of the largest events of its kind, attracting international filmmakers working in or around short films. This year's festival, one of the largest yet, saw a strong Arab presence from across the region, with filmmakers from Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan and Syria being present in force and presenting some highly distinguished films. From Egypt, director Karim Fanous was in competition with Clean Hands, Dirty Soap, the Clermont-Ferrand event being the first international screening of this short film. Fanous studied cinema in New York, and his first film, Going Where?, has been shown in many international film festivals. Adam Mourad wrote the script for Clean Hands, and Victor Kridi, a US film graduate, handled the camera, with Fanous himself doing the editing. The main character in the film is Hadi, a young man working as a janitor in a Cairo nightclub. Most of Hadi's time is spent cleaning the club's washrooms, and the images of Hadi's life that Fanous projects are fraught with repetition and monotony. He is surrounded by the white, sterile environment of the washroom where he works, and a sense of entrapment is artfully developed, underlined by the tortuous sound of dripping water. After a dull day's work, Hadi goes home to tend to his sick mother. When he has time to himself, he picks up his oud and plays a little. However, one day friends take Hadi to a nightclub, this time as a customer, and the film immediately changes mood, from the coldness of the washrooms to the club's exciting interior. Hadi meets a girl, Nur, who works in the club, and he falls in love, though the relationship does not turn out to be an easy one. Also in competition was Lebanese director Rami Kudeih, who entered his 25-minute short film Scheherazade. Kudeih studied film in Beirut, and this film is his graduation project. As is the case with many first films, Scheherazade has an appealing freshness that some later, more articulate works lose. A love story set against the backdrop of a hard neighbourhood of Beirut, the film ends in tragedy. Kudeih, who grew up in a similar neighbourhood, hired local people to appear in the film and wrote the script and edited the final version himself. Another Arab director, the Moroccan Hamid Basket, showed a similarly distinguished film also set in a poor urban neighbourhood. In his film Le Dernier Cri, he tells the story of a child who discovers that his mother is cheating on his father with a neighbour and the child's gradual realisation that in the poverty-stricken Moroccan city neighbourhood in which he lives moral values are often discarded as options narrow. Though still conducting an affair, we see the wife taking money from her lover in order to buy food for her sick husband, her eight- year-old son being left to try to understand what all this means. The administrators of the Clermont-Ferrand Festival watched over 4,500 short films from around the world before selecting 75 to show in the international competition. So although Fanous, Kudeih and Basket did not in the event win any of the festival's final awards, the fact that their films were shown in the main competition is enough of a recommendation and served to highlight the Arab presence at the event. The festival also featured a French competition, held separately from the international one, that included 45 entries. A third competition, The Lab, featured only experimental or animated movies and had 42 entries. Finally, this festival, which attracted some 80 short films from each of 50 different countries, was impeccably run and administered, unlike some that have been held in our region.
