This week, the Stranger Festival - Europe's largest competition for young video makers - arrived in Cairo. The touring show consists of 77 videos made by European youth. From Amsterdam to the Balkans, videographers up to the age of 25 present a variety of topics, from "being strange and a stranger to "the problems of censorship. The festival had hosted over 40 video workshops in more than 20 European countries. Last week, it extended its work here with a workshop for Egyptian youth at the Townhouse. The exhibition presents a vast range of life experiences throughout the European continent. From works by a lonely teenage boy in northern Finland to the personal narrative of the granddaughter of a Romanian gypsy, the festival transcends the popular connotations of the word "European by presenting broad realities within the lives of similarly aged people. Not shying away from hard stories, the chosen videos defy stereotypes by presenting class and racial differences and diasporic realities. Muslim voices speak from Western Europe, while youth from India to Sweden tell their stories in English, in the accented vowels of their mother tongues. The exhibition is divided into three parts: a "Private Area, "Public Area and an "Interactive Area. Two large video projections are displayed side by side upon entering the Public Area. Each contains a separate loop of video shorts from youth around the world. The right hand screen holds a variety of interesting tales from an international cropping of teenagers, some experimenting for the first time with the medium. Among the selection is the science fiction short of a boy from India. A "genius working in his shop, he accidentally turns himself invisible in the process of patenting his greatest invention. From Berlin comes a video about a young man who moves a human robot around with a Nintendo game boy, only to have the robot turn on him in the end. The filmmakers visually represent frustration, crushes, cravings for glamor. They use their daily surroundings, the people they know, familiar objects as tools. The videos sometimes seem like daydreams. All this is sharply contrasted with the video screen on the left. There, in tales of political injustice - from orphaned street children in Zaire to war victims in Afghanistan - teenagers tell their stories on top of subtitles. Most shocking is the imagination and selflessness many of these young documentary makers employ. Among the most vivid of the group is a short from Jordan about a 14-year-old boy from Iraq. The boy's father was killed when his house was hit by a missile, forcing the boy to join the Iraqi army against his will in order to support his family. In doing so, he was asked to plant a car bomb which exploded as he set it, causing him to lose his left leg. The fresh face of the boy, his bright eyes and raspy voice stood tenderly at the top of shot that eventually moved downward to reveal him in his wheelchair, in his soldier uniform. The Interactive Area provides some respite from the previous intensity with a collection of one-minute shorts, and short biographical studies of their makers. Cute, skillfully edited and fun to watch, this section is presented through a large computer screen and a mouse. Young faces dot a light gray map of Europe allowing you to choose the country you'd like to see. I saw a video from a 12-year-old girl in Norway about her relationship with her twin sister, a piece about the many identities within one individual made by a 17-year-old Palestinian boy living in Eastern Europe, and a montage by a 25-year-old business student in Spain - the latter involves him walking barefoot through many parts of his town, shooting his feet and the ground beneath him. There is something so intimate, private and revealing in the act of turning a video camera on oneself. In the Stranger Festival, youth from all over the world do so on 77 different occasions. Their stories are sometimes silly, sometimes wordless, often adeptly edited, sometimes deeply poignant. We are forced to commend the bravery of these young auteurs. From a desert road, calling from within her video, a young girl from Dubai asks us, "Why can't we just have people talk with one another? The Stranger Festival is a start. The Stranger Festival is on view in the Factory Space of the Townhouse Gallery until March 8. Tel: (02) 2576 8086.
