From CAIRO with LOVE

The Jury for International Competition for Long Feature films comprised Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein,Argentinian director Hector Olivera,Canadian actor Remy Girard,Egyptian directors Ali Ahmed Badra Khan and Mohamed Hefzy,Indian actor Irrfan Khan,Roman film studio Cinecitta’s Managing Diector Luciano Sovena,Moroccan actor Mohammed Moftah,South African actress Denise Newman,South Korean actress Yun Junghee and Turkish actress Meltem Cumbul. India’s Celina Jaitley was part of the Digital Competition Jury. The colourful festival catalogue was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Amina Rizk and Mahmoud El Maligy,two shining stars of Egyptian cinema. Egyptian creator Fouad Saeed,who won an Oscar for artistic creativity for his new invention (The cini Mobile),was honoured at the festival. He remains the only Egyptian to have won the Oscar.

The Egyptian film Lust (2010),directed by Khaled El Hagar,won the Golden Pyramid,the top award of the festival. It was presented to the movie’s producer Mohamad Yassine. Sawsan Badr,the leading lady of the film,won the Best Actress award along with Isabelle Huppert,for March Floussi’s French movie Copacabana. Lust is about Um Shooq,a woman from Alexandria whose sense of shame and inadequacy drives her to gain leverage over the little world in which she lives. Copacabana is about Babou,an irresponsible misfit of a woman who has no compunctions about leaving her job,husband and so on and reduces herself to such a degrading existence that even her daughter is ashamed to invite her to her own wedding.

Joy,directed by Mijke de Jong of The Netherlands,won the Golden Award in the Feature Digital Films Section for its “ability to capture the essence of painful human survival with an ideal blend of aesthetics,technical excellence and powerful narrative content.” It is about Joy,a young girl who sets out to look for her biological mother. Raised in orphanages,she feels that she has no roots and anchor in her life. When her best friend Denise becomes pregnant,Joy’s quest becomes an obsession. Caroline Kamya’s film from Uganda,Imani,bagged the Silver Award for Foreign Digital Films for taking a closer look at the lives of people in the country. The Polish film Born of the Sea directed by Andrzej Kotkowski won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for the Best First work of a director. The story unravels the slow and steady friendship between two young men and a woman who are trying to make meaning out of their lives in the seaside town of Gydnia in Poland in 1923.

Moroccan film The Mosque won a special mention by the Digital Films Jury. It is based on a true story of the construction of a mosque for the shooting of a film Waiting for Bazolini that was later transformed into a real prayer house by the local villagers. The Swiss film The Savage explores the relationship between a thief and a loner.

One of the most outstanding films that was screened at the festival was Italian movie The Father and the Foreigner directed by Ricky Tognazzi. It is about the strange bonding that develops between a Roman bureaucrat and a rich Syrian businessman through their handicapped kids. Based on a literary work by Giancario De Cataldo,the film fetched the Best Actor Award for the two actors Alessandro Gassman and Amr Waked. The film also won the Saad-El-Din Wahba prize for the best script. Emir,a film from the Phillipines helmed by Chito S. Rono,turned out to be a wonderful and entertaining musical with compositions by the Philharmonic Orchestra. It is about Amelia,an ayah,who migrates to a fictional Sheikh’s kingdom in the Middle East and the small world of ayahs in the royal household that ends partly in tragedy. The film won the Youssef Chahine Prize for the Best Artistic Contribution in Music and Cinematography. The prize for the Best Director went to Svetoslav Ovtcharov for the Bulgarian film Voice Over. It is about the sudden alienation and victimisation of a veteran cinematographer who suffers from asthma and whose wife and son migrate to Berlin. He gets in trouble when his director is forced to opt out of the film and he begins to work under the new director and gets threatening calls. The film also won the FIPRESCI Prize for “the depiction of the influence of a dictatorial political regime on the lives of ordinary people.”

Sadly,none of the Indian entries could make a mark,either in terms of winning a prize,or in terms of popularity and critical acclaim. Aparna Sen’s Iti Mrinalini was the sole Indian entry in the International Competition for Long Feature Films. The Way Home directed by Dr Biju featured in the Official Selection Out of Competition section. Four Indian films — Gautham Vasudev Menon’s Will You Reach Me From The Sky?,Anjan Das’ Achin Pakhi,Abhishek Chaubey’s Ishqiya and Sanjay Patkar’s Riwayat —- were part of the most prestigious Festival of Festivals section.