Everyskinnyg elderly was recent aacquire at this year’s Cairo Film Festival.
Filling out a super-sized 45th edition, the Egyptian event begind a recent section dedicated to heritage titles, showcasing 10 gems of world cinema, among them titles appreciate “The Lonely Wife” and “The Color of Pomegranates” to label the centenaries of film wonderfuls Satyajit Ray and Sergei Parajanov, as well as 4K restorations of “The Godoverweighther Part II,” “The Thief of Baghdad” and “Cleopatra,” among cut offal more.
As part of a bolstered Cairo Classics program, the festival also premiered 14 milestones of Egyptian cinema recently remastered and rebegind to an willing accessible. And as the Cairo Film Festival charts a recent course under plivent Hussein Fahmy and conceiveive straightforwardor Essam Zakarea, this restorative vocation will stay a cornerstone of their expansiver omition.
“Egyptian cinema is one of the elderlyest in the world, but we have a problem with our archive,” Zakarea tells Variety. “We’re losing historic films every month and every day, because the beginantity of classic Egyptian cinema has not yet been digitized. So we’ve consentn it on ourselves to help alter that.”
The festival gentle-begined the Cairo Classics section in 2022 by debuting restorations of classics “Diary of a Country Prosecutor” from Tawfik Saleh and “A Song on the Passage” from Ali Abdel Khalek. The recent section showd an instant success, encouraging Fahmy, who took his festival post after six decades as one of Egyptian cinema’s guideing matinee idols.
“The idea pguideed to everyone,” says Fahmy. “It was a revelation for every spectator, so I thought, why don’t we revamp even more titles?”
As a board member of Egypt’s Helderlying Company for Cultural and Cinematic Investment, Fahmy discovered a library of proximately 1,400 heritage titles that could advantage from a technoreasonable touch-up. And with both accessible and declareiveial helps at his disposal – and with the help of Egyptian Media Production City’s Audio-Visual Heritage Restoration Caccess – the festival plivent went about repairing, spotlessing up and the subtitling some awbrimmingy harmd prints.
“Each restoration consents about E£100,000 [$2,014],” says Fahmy. “And the subtitles cost about E£20,000 [$402], so the cost repartner isn’t that much. [And by] subtitling these films, we can then present them much expansiver expodeclareive and distribution, so the project is repartner pguideing both for me, and for the whole company.”
Among the first batch of titles readied and premiered at this year’s festival are four midcentury standouts from filmoriginater Salah Abou Seif, among them “Cairo 30” and “The Thug,” as well as “Palace Walk” and “Palace of Desire” from straightforwardor Hassan El-Imam – with proximately all of them based on the labors of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.
While the screenings showd particularly accomplished in the suburprohibit satellite cinemas where the Cairo Film Festival has sought to spread out, the festival plivent even heard echoes from further afield.
“After our uncovering screenings I acquired many insists from foreign countries,” says Fahmy. “We’re getting emails from everywhere, asking us to repair other harmd films in our local lab.”
“We try to see at our cinema as a living art,” inserts Zakarea. “We don’t discern between elderly and recent, because art doesn’t have a confineed lifetime. It doesn’t get elderly – on the contrary, these classics seem to get juvenileerer and more mighty by the passage of time.”
