Covering the 30th Cairo International Film Festival was both exhilarating and grueling. Looking back at the past ten days, I understand now that the biggest challenge for me wasn t the demanding schedule or waiting hours to exchange a few words with the stars. The biggest challenge was, by far, the struggle to endure the cheesiness, banality and all around pretentiousness of our beloved local journos. My ordeal kicked off with the opening ceremony where I suffered the misfortune of sitting next to an Al Gomhuria newspaper reporter who, couldn't understand a word of English to save his life, and I realized following a brief exchange, that he was practically cinema "illiterate . First off, he mistook some clippings from a documentary by Egyptian director Inas El-Degheidy for Troy. Is Bitt Brad coming? he asked. No, BRAD Pitt is too busy throwing some cocktail parties to celebrate another adoption in Africa, I barked. Minutes later, he started asking about Danny Glover. He s the guy from Lethal Weapon, I interrupted. Oh.Mel Jibson, mashy, he said. I prayed to heaven that would be the end of it, but the real tragedy started when he asked me to translate every single speech spoken in English. Glover s just going on about conflicts between civilizations, I said, defeated. Ditto for the Jackie Bisset and Charles Aznavour speeches. They re just talking about conflicts between civilizations, I shrugged. When Mia Maestro came on stage, he was hoping for a different answer, but I didn't disappoint: Well, she s just talking about conflicts between civilizations. What s wrong with these people he uttered in disbelief. You know these foreigners man, they obviously have issues! I said as I rushed to the nearest exit. The next day, I had my first brush of the press conferences madness. There are two types of critics who film screenings and conferences: those who seize any chance to voice their hollow opinions to the aggravated audiences; and those who ask questions that are either cliché or irrelevant to the subject at hand. The moderators are in a league of their own, many preferring to shove their points of views down everyone's throats instead of , well, moderating. Of these critics though, two get the grand prize for being the absolute worse of them all. First is the reporter who got himself trashed at the Hide & Seek press conference. He mastered the art of asking inconsequential questions that left many a filmmaker speechless. At the Call Me Salome conference for instance, he kept babbling on about the importance of curtains in one of the scenes before expressing his admiration for the structure of the film that defies American conventions when, in fact, such a technique was used a thousand different times before by the same cinema he was slamming. But nothing compared to the infamous Al-Ahram daily reporter who lost his temper at the Arab honorees press conference. From day one, the self-proclaimed critic left everyone disgruntled by his utter failure to articulate a single plausible idea. And yet, strange enough, the man became a source of amusement to the baffled audiences that were always caught off-guard by his comments. His brush with Mia Maestro ranked among the most memorable moments of that day. Welcoom to Egypt he famously began. Hwy too much sex in Argentinean films? Maestro wasn t just struck by the silliness of the question but due to the fact that Argentina is known to be one of the most reserved countries in Latin America. Another classic moment was during the Jackie Bisset press conference when he expressed his disappointment with Bisset s performance in The Greek Tycoon , a film she did almost 30 years ago. As Jacqueline Kennedy, you weren t convincing to me and it s my right as a film critic to criticize you. The attendees, now familiar with him, screamed: Where is the question for God s sake? The last time I saw my buddy was during the Civic Duty discussion when he started bickering with the moderator Magda Morris for not giving him a chance earlier to ask his question. I m a member of the cinema club with you and I have the right to ask my questions before anyone else! he screamed. The intellectual mayhem created in the festival wasn t only restricted to those two critics; the examples are endless. Who could forget the one who used to sleep and snore during film screenings; the TV correspondent who missed the ending of the Czech film to stand up and criticize the exact ending he never saw; or the tens of media representatives who repetitively asked the same questions about Bush s politics and the possibility of a future collaboration between Egypt and the starring guests. My dear colleague Sarah El Sirgany was coping with this insanity by drawing lovely pictures of men blowing their heads off. I, on the other hand, realized later that our press is indeed the worst press in the world and in that realization, I found my salvation. Egypt is making progress in various fields. We no longer have the worst soccer team or the worst economy or women with the biggest backsides on the planet. Yet we still do have the worst press in the world, a press so bad that no other nation can match us. This gives us the unique identity the country s always been chasing after. And for that, I m eternally ungrateful!
