Egyptian artists and intellectuals protested outside Cairo's French Centre for Culture for screening a film directed by an Israeli national at a festival, which starts Thursday. The film festival “Recontres de l'image" is due to run until next Thursday. A group of Egyptian directors earlier released a statement about their decision to boycott the festival as Egypt's National Centre for Cinema withdrew all Egyptian films from the festival in protest. Among those who protested Thursday were Helmi Shaarawi, the head of the Arab and African Research Centre, activist Amin Iskandar and directors Tawfiq Saleh and Ahmed Atef. Atef and actor Asser Yassin, as well as director Kamla Abou Zekri, quit their places on the festival panel because of the Israeli film. "I respect France's freedom to choose the films participating in a festival it organises, but I quit because, as much as I respect their rights, I also have the right to take the position I decide," Atef said Thursday. Egyptian intellectuals rejected in a statement two days ago the French Foreign Ministry's decision to screen the film after the culture centre's previous decision to remove it. "We [condemn] the French Foreign Ministry's blatant intervention and unacceptable pressure on the management of the festival, which is held by the French Cultural Centre to force it to show the film Almost normal by Israeli director Karen Ben-Rafael in the festival. We consider it to be a special festival of independent Egyptian movies," the statement read. One of the directors, Khaled Youssef, remarked, "It would have been better for the National Cinema Centre... to announce immediately the establishment of a special film festival for Egyptian young people" to be held concurrently with the French festival. Bernard Kouchner, France's Foreign Minister, said he regretted the "withdrawal of Egyptian films and members of the arbitration panel of the festival." The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said the comment came as a surprise to them. France has been critical of Egypt's position but as of last week, the French Embassy in Cairo had not released any statement about the Egyptian pullout. Egypt was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. But anti-Israel sentiment runs high in the country.
