Please watch Nadi al-Cinema (Cinema Club) TV program tonight because it will be its last episode after almost 1,600 weeks. The program has no place in the current development plan. It will be cancelled as of next March. However, its great presenter Doria Sharaf Eddin refuses offers from other satellite channels. She is struggling for her program and has not lost hope.
Many people, like us, grew up on Nadi al-Cinema. If someone did not watch a series, he would feel bitter regret. This great program has never re-screened its episodes throughout its long history. But tonight's episode – if it is screened - will be, unprecedentedly, an old one, as this week's episode has not been shot because the Egyptian Radio and TV Union (ERTU) has no place for shooting an episode that only needs two seats and a camera!
In fact, Nadi al-Cinema is a weekly instructive program that fights darkness, and a bright light that disturbs nocturnal birds. Some people are depriving the ERTU of all its legitimate weapons of enlightenment.
Indeed, Sharaf Eddin was part of our families and they used to wait for her program on Saturdays night with her veteran Egyptian film critic Youssef Cherif Rizkallah (before they separated). We watched all the schools of the world Cinema with detailed critical analysis.
Thanks to Sharaf Eddin's great effort, Nadi al-Cinema, with its unique movies, was a favorite meal for people in Egypt's cities and villages. It contributed to spreading public and technical movie culture. It received special recognition from the public, who waited for movies starring great Hollywood actors.
No Arab satellite channel, even al-Jazeera, has been able to produce a program like Nadi al-Cinema, with its famous presenter and carefully-selected guests. It was a destination for top directors, script writers, novelists, writers, university professors and public figures, who were interviewed for free.
No one wants to lose and the ERTU certainly makes profits from such a great program. Therefore, it is difficult to imagine what has been happening to the program over the past three months. There have been attempts to strangle the program by banning good and new movies. The ERTU is providing the program with its wastes. Sharaf Eddin does not co-select the movies that will be screened. How could this be done with a program that used to screen the best and the latest? Who is benefiting from the ERTU being deprived of its good programs, which could be easily moved to other competitor channels? We are worried about the successive cancellations of cultural programs. Who is responsible for the ideological approach and the cultural content of development? What are their determinants? The "Destroy your old bathroom" slogan has failed in the field of sewage and will, of course, fail when it comes to media development, as development does not mean destruction. Yes, Nadi al-Cinema has screened comedy movies, but it has never screened superstitions, which have instead become a symbol of many ERTU programs.
