“NOT so long ago, the mere idea of using your mobile phone to make a film in the street , at your place or in a train and to be able to broadcast it from that same spot , was a dream to cinema lovers. Today, this dream has become reality!" so wrote the author of the profile page of Cairo Cinemobile Film Festival's website, introducing the concept of the event and its significance. While it is indeed no exaggeration to describe cinemobile production as a dream coming true, the thinly-veiled suggestion that the new art-tech comer is interesting only to cinema lovers is far from exact. Cinemobile productivity, viewership, sharing and consequent interactivity do place the whole exercise far beyond the boundaries of traditional movie-making, movie-going, watching habits and the established patterns of post-watching reaction. Again, the distinction is not one of ‘mobility' as so also presented on the festival's website. It is digitalisation and belonging to the larger conceptual framework of the new media. Last Thursday, the festival organisers staged its award-granting event which received only faint press and media coverage. In a country where the new media was nationally and internationally acknowledged for having contributed most vociferously to the break-out and peaking of the January 2011 Revolution that dismantled a strong and long-entrenched regime, celebrating an event of the sort of a cinemobile competition should have gained a much wider scale. Further and above, it should have been truly invested in sending out twin messages – one to reassure creators, particularly since most, if not all, of cinemobile production competitors and fans are youths, and the other to encourage genuine creativeness in all walks of life. As the nation is demonstrably heading for historical rebuilding as a democratic, civilian and constitutional state, all social activities of relevance to the promotion of public awareness, including creativity and innovativeness in the foremost, do deserve deeper and broader care – something that was apparently missing in the case of the cinemobile film festival. First, media coverage showed no presence of cabinet ministers or senior state officials who are assumingly tasked with encouraging such activities. And even the entertainment and other celebs who appeared at Thursday's event of announcing the award-winning titles and names were obviously very few. Second, the awards were by all standards so modest in value that they should have better been replaced by token gifts or, better still, by letters of appreciation and acknowledgement. Press reports had it that the top award was a sum of LE 30,000, the equivalent of US$ 5000 and that one award was an in-house router and a USB modem[sic]! The case might be defended by to the lack of financially heavy-weight sponsors. But since the title-makers and award winners were definitely competing for due recognition rather than for monetisation of their creativity, a word of appreciation from a state body or even from a top brand content producer, corporate or natural, would have sufficed.
