However, as the project unfolds, and we see the German-funded cultural intervention led by filmmaker Marcus Vetter, the film shifts into something far more revealing: a committed study of power, race, and hierarchy disguised as charity and development in war-torn areas. Taking place in 2008, the center of Bakri’s sensitive film is 59-year-old Hussein Darby, the last projectionist of Jenin Cinema, a man who has spent 43 years tending film reels and coaxing projectors to life.

When residents of the militarised and often brutalised Jenin refugee camp hear that the ‘cinema people’ are coming, they think of actors. It is not just realising a dream of restoring the cinema but also the possibility of a job in the camp, which he describes as a place where one “cannot find bread.” The renovation project is spearheaded by Marcus Vetter (director of Cinema Jenin: The Story of a Dream) and Fakhri Hamad. Bakri captures a critical backstage take of Vetter’s film.

Alex problematises “white man saviour” syndromes in cinema, and highlights the imbalanced power dynamics that the German team and NGO carry when operating, and how this dynamic has affected Hussein. Bakri’s direction is brilliantly marked by deliberate absence. He rarely intervenes, allowing awkward and tense conversations, cringeworthy exchanges, small victories, and quiet humiliations to speak for themselves. This restraint is not passive, allowing for empowering storytelling. Through editing and careful framing, Bakri constructs a portrait of a man trying to navigate a sphere where he is both needed and discarded.

Enters Hussein, who has been working as a machinist from the age of twelve and spent decades projecting kung-fu films and Bollywood melodramas for Jenin’s audiences. He knows the craft intimately and the cinema by heart. He is assigned to fix the old 50-year-old carbon-arc projector, and he embarks on a determined quest across the West Bank: visiting shuttered cinemas, abandoned shops, and the homes of retired projectionists. He knocks on doors, asks for spare carbon rods, scavenges lenses and reels. He even goes to the heirs of the owners of the old cinemas and finally heads to a café on the sixth floor called “The Godfather” to meet a ‘guy who knows a guy’ who can hook him up. He returns, triumphant, carrying the needed pieces in plastic bags, and eventually fixes the machine.

In one of the film’s most moving scenes, Hussein cleans the dusty projection booth and brings the carbon arc back to life. The flicker, the whir, the beam slicing through the dusty darkness spark magic and hope in his eyes, not as a cinema lover but as an old Palestinian man, the resident of a refugee camp. Despite the initial success, the German team, part of its ‘development’ plan, is to introduce a projection workshop under the leadership of Franz, a young projectionist flown in from Germany to “train the locals.” Bakri uses this dynamic to problematize a familiar pattern: the Western expert imported to teach what the local already knows.

Franz, for all his formal education, sometimes cannot fix what Hussein repairs right away. Still, the hierarchy remains present, and other forms of imbalance as well, through simple dialogue which Bakri captures. While fixing a machine together, Franz praises Hussein’s taste in music when he hears The Beatles playing in the background — “Beatles, habibi, Beatles super good” — adding that he would never have guessed Hussein had “good taste.” This casual condescension is thoroughly documented by Bakri’s camera. When Oum Kulthum begins playing, Franz jokingly asks, “Oh Huessin, habibi. Where did the Beatles go?”

In this film, language is another field of imbalance. In one scene, a facilitator and Franz discuss, in English, which parts of their conversation should be interpreted for Hussein, specifically whether Hussein will be paid or merely volunteer “until the cinema opens.” Arabs working in Europe or the U.S. are often criticized for imperfect language skills, yet Westerners in the Arab world can pass through interactions with phrases like “habibi,” “shokran,” and “ma’ al-salamah.” In the film, “habibi” becomes a term that marks not intimacy but hierarchy. Originally a term of endearment for Arabic speakers, it turns into a box that limits “the other.” This othering is present in conversations by Vetter and the German team.

During an interview, Marcus acknowledges the difference between his people and others. “And then comes the realization that these are simply different kinds of talents. We… Germans, international Europeans; maybe we’re more structured,” he says, adding, “we write more things down. Here, not much is written down. And Palestinians, like many others, are always in the position of recipients. Everything they get, they receive from someone else. And so they sit and wait for something to happen. And if nothing comes from us, not much happens from here either.”

This shocking soundbite, which fails to interrogate why Palestinians are positioned as recipients in the first place, a symptom of the very dynamic the film critiques, extends beyond cultural presumptions. When the team fails to find the proper lenses, Hussein embarks on another shopping trip, attempting to reach Israel to procure a particular lens for the projector. It becomes a portrait of humiliation. He stands at the checkpoint with broken Hebrew, papers in hand, surrounded by soldiers. His permit is rejected. The equipment never arrives. The project moves on without him. Later, everyone involved receives a certificate of participation except Hussein. The German team celebrates their achievement, Palestinian Authority officials arrive in suits for photo ops, and Hussein, the man who kept Jenin’s cinematic memory alive, stands in the projection booth, unacknowledged.

The success of Cinema Jenin was short-lived due to the economy and the continuous raids on the city by Israeli forces, and seven years later the cinema was shut down. In this film, Bakri decentralises cinema from being a Western idea where the white saviour arrives to teach the locals. Despite the challenges, Hussein, who passed away months after the closure, was able to momentarily triumph. The film is a tribute to the worth of the person who understood the cinema best.

Director, screenwriter, cinematography, and editing: Alex Bakri
Cast: Hussein Darby
Producer: May Odeh
Production: Odeh Films, kaske film
Venue: The Cairo Film Festival (International Critics Week)
In Arabic, English, German
96 minutes

The original title, Dalloway, is an obvious literary allusion (as is the name of the human protagonist, Clarissa), but also the designation of the real main character of the story: an AI that serves as a personal assistant. This happens within the housing complex of the Ludovico Foundation, a residence for professional authors suffering from writer’s block. Clarissa (Cécile De France) is one of them, and through her daily interactions with Dalloway she seems to have found inspiration again.

And yet, something is not quite right, as Clarissa soon realizes her assistant’s behavior is becoming a bit too intrusive, way outside the parameters set for their coexistence within the confines of the building (which the residents are not supposed to leave due to an ongoing health crisis). While the staff, in the person of Anne DeWinter (Anna Mouglalis), assures her everything is fine, another resident, Jim Perrier (Lars Mikkelsen), sees things differently, and Clarissa must figure out whether it’s just a paranoid conspiracy theory or something real and sinister.

It is perhaps no surprise as to where the plot of this dystopian mystery will take us, but the recognizable elements are all brought to the screen with panache, as Gozlan clearly relishes the opportunity to tell this kind of story – rooted in a novel by Tatiana De Rosnay – in 2025, when the ethics of AI are an increasingly thorny project (mere months after the film’s world premiere, articles started to appear about an entirely artificial actress, with an inevitable outcry from human thespians, their representation and the unions).

Most intriguing is his choice for what Dalloway sounds like: while AI in the real world typically relies on copying pre-existing work with a somewhat off-putting effect, its cinematic incarnations tend to have distinctive voices filled with personality (think James Spader as Ultron in the Marvel universe). The virtual protagonist of this film is no exception, as she’s portrayed by Mylène Farmer, the Canadian-born French singer whose artistry is exactly the kind of thing machines can try to replicate without ever fully capturing its essence, its soul. Through Farmer’s work, Dalloway acquires just enough charisma and spunk to make us understand why Clarissa would confide in her before realizing it may have been a mistake.

As such, what The Residence lacks in originality (somehow fitting for a film with an AI-related premise), it makes up for in execution, exploring the ramifications of a technologized world with a healthy dose of wit that contrasts nicely with the rather sterile environments that gradually take over everyone’s lives. And it’s highly unlikely anyone who writes for a living will come out of the screening thinking that kind of assistant would be a good idea. Or at least, one should hope so.

Director: Yann Gozlan
Screenwriters: Yann Gozlan, Nicolas Bouvet-Levrard, Thomas Kruithof
Cast: Mylène Farmer, Cécile De France, Anna Mouglalis, Lars Mikkelsen
Producers: Nicolas Altmayer, Eric Altmayer
Cinematography: Manu Dacosse
Production design: Thierry Flamand
Costume design: Olivier Ligen
Music: Philippe Rombi
Sound: Armance Durix
Production companies: Gaumont, Mandarin & Compagnie, Anga Productions, Panache Productions, La Compagnie Cinéma
World sales: Gaumont
Venue: Cairo International Film Festival (Midnight Screenings)
In French, English
110 minutes

The story revolves around Wahida (Shaimaa El Fadul), a woman dealing with the trauma of her twin sister Nisma’s death. She also struggles with tinnitus, making her relationship with sounds an awkward and sometimes painful one, as conveyed already in the opening scene, which sets the tone for the picture quite efficiently. So it’s quite apt – and terrifying – that the object upending her daily routine is a series of cassette tapes which supposedly shed new light on Nisma’s fate, leading to Wahida’s quest for the truth that may come at the expense of her own sanity, as the barrier between reality and hallucination gets increasingly, frighteningly thinner.

The cassettes are found behind a green door (hence the title), an image that may inadvertently evoke cinephile memories of a certain American film from the so-called Golden Age of Porn (1972’s Behind the Green Door, starring Marilyn Chambers). Of course, there’s nothing salacious about Baab, and the only reasonable comparison between the two might be that they both have a female protagonist experiencing something earth-shattering, albeit for wildly different reasons. And in both cases, the green door is the element that changes things irrevocably.

How it does so in the case of this film is not exactly a big surprise if one has some genre knowledge: Al Khaja is not really interested in reinventing a familiar storyline, but rather in exploring the deeper ramifications of trauma for a woman who has been physically and psychologically damaged. Key to the effectiveness of every single shot focusing on Wahida’s inner turmoil is the work of sound designer Krishnan Subramanian, who walks the fine line between everyday banality and nightmare scenario on an aural level and plays an integral part in the creation of a progressively eerie atmosphere.

Much like the plot, the imagery is far from groundbreaking, but as Al Khaja and cinematographer Rogier Stoffers move from one layer of reality to another, their confident filmmaking lends the sanity-bending scenes a keen sense of distorted spatial awareness. Paired with El Fadul’s committed performance, it’s a compelling piece of cinematic bravura that takes recognizable tropes and gives them a splash of individuality, right up to the concluding shot.

For Wahida, the titular door is a gateway leading to something potentially upsetting. For the director, it represents opportunity, as it confirms the promise of her debut and further establishes her as one of the sharper, more interesting recent voices in the Arab filmmaking world. Through a relic of the past such as the cassette tape, she’s become an exciting part of Emirati cinema’s present and future.

Director: Nayla Al Khaja
Screenwriter: Nayla Al Khaja, Masoud Amralla Al Ali
Cast: Shaimaa El Fadul, Huda Alghanem, Meera Almidfa, Mansoor Alnoamani, Sabiha Majgaonkar, Elham Al Marzooqi
Producers: Nayla Al Khaja, Jude S. Walko
Cinematography: Rogier Stoffers
Production design: Ahmed Hasan Ahmed
Costume design: Saioa Lara
Music: A.R. Rahman
Sound: Krishnan Subramanian
Production companies: Baab Fze, Dark Dunes Productions, Nayla al Khaja Films
World sales: Nayla Al Khaja Films
Venue: Cairo International Film Festival (Midnight Screenings)
In Arabic
97 minutes

Not far away in the Cairo Opera House, the glamorous red carpet looks and gossip have not overshadowed the carefully curated films, which proved to be a strong debut for newly appointed Artistic Director Mohamed Tarek. This year, it seems that the curatorial path of Cairo was chosen to echo regional festivals like Tallinn and Karlovy Vary whose strength lies in shaping the film industry of their regions.

This year the diverse programme featured many Arab titles, making their premiere in Cairo a smart move, even considering the rise of economically flush festivals in the region with higher budgets such as Red Sea, El Gouna, and Doha. However, Cairo has made it clear that it sees the presence of these festivals as friendly competition. The Saudi Film Commission is a sponsor, the festival has collaborated with El Gouna in the Cannes Marche, and has announced a new collaboration with the Film Committee in Qatar Media City.

Despite being sandwiched between El Gouna in October and Red Sea in December, the festival still has the clout to put together a high quality selection of titles in its dedicated section of nine films from the MENA region, Horizons of Arab Cinema. Winning the section’s award for Best Arabic Film was the story of a decomposing marriage set to a synthesizer score, Dead Dog by  Lebanon-based writer-director Sarah Francis. The estranged relationship between the film’s couple, much in evidence after the husband returns after many years of working abroad, underlines the personal and even intimate topics explored in this eclectic selection, where political themes generally took a back seat.

Social themes, however, abounded. In the documentary Flana by director-producer Zahraa Ghandour, the filmmaker poses the question of why Iraqi families abandon their daughters. The answers are painful and encompass everything from religion and clan tradition to Iraqi and tribal law, but it is an original and valid approach to gender politics in the region. The film received a Special Mention. Other women’s stories dominated the section. In Azza, documentarian Stephanie Brockhaus presents a bright, unexpectedly upbeat portrait of a young woman and divorced mother whose personal search for identity and independence has little to do with men. To earn a living she gives driving lessons in her 4 wheel drive SUV, which she uses to tear up the desert for the sheer joy of it.

A very different workplace story is told in the highly stylized Looking for Ayda, directed by Sarra Abidi and set in a remote part of Tunisia, where the heroine is a prim manager in a call center. The film has a surprising modernity and its portrait of dehumanized office workers who toil for a heartless, faceless company is universally recognizable. In contrast, Ali Benjelloun’s Goundafa shows a traditional Moroccan tribal village that risks going backwards into extremist Islam, when the influence of a conservative new imam hypnotizes the male residents, leading to an economic, emotional and cultural disaster. But the section also embraced a highly successful comic title, Complaint No. 713317, which won a Best Screenplay award for the film’s writer-director Yasser Shafiey.  Set in an Egyptian household where the refrigerator breaks down, it humorously highlights the gender question in a clever story.

Palestine remains a topic of interest and solidarity with the Palestinian people is an ongoing path for the festival. It placed Palestinian cinema at its heart with eight titles, highlighting resilience, dispossession, memory, and survival.

That being said, the festival did not forget its international scope, bringing titles from Germany, Pakistan, Hungry, China, and the US, in addition to a retrospective on Turkish cinema.

Maryam Touzani’s Calle Málaga was probably the most-discussed film after two sold-out screenings, with many of the audience praising the film, and reports of  laughter and singing during the film. The same admiration was shown in Once Upon a Time in Gaza, codirected by Tarzan and Arab Nasser, which won the Best Directing Award as well as Best Arab Feature. Nevertheless, the Youssef Sherif Rizkallah Audience Award went to Mai Saad and Ahmed Al Danaf’s One More Show, which captures fragile resilience amid relentless devastation in the Gaza Circus Troupe.

From David Lynch’s short films to Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) and Youssef Chahine’s The People and the Nile (1972), a new generation of filmgoers has rediscovered world masterpieces. A happy phenomenon this year, which makes more and more sense considering the high percentage of young people in Egypt, is the presence of younger audiences engaged in all the sections, whether in the Opera House, Zamalek cinemas, or at the American University in Cairo. The interest in classic films, especially Egyptian, indicates a shift in the interest of young audiences who for years seemed only interested in Hollywood blockbusters.

CIFF is both following and fuelling the rising interest in independent international cinema in Egypt. The Cairo Opera House, once a closed-off space for ballet, classical music, and ministry employees, has become newly appealing to younger audiences thanks to accessible ticket prices. Meanwhile, the festival’s Restored Classics section—screening 21 films—offers a crucial lifeline in a country without a unified film archive and with scattered, often damaged Egyptian negatives.

The Short Films Competition continues to have a strong impact at the festival, one that is not just limited to film students and indie film enthusiasts. It continues to evolve with the festival’s global, forward-looking spirit. A beautiful moment took place when Abdullah Al-Taye’s extremely personal and sensitive short film Cairo Streets scooped the Youssef Chahine Best Short Film Award, a testament to Al-Taye who featured the veteran Egyptian filmmaker in his film.

For the first time, Cairo added immersive experiences to its lineup via its XR program, a selection of works both new and slightly less so (the Taiwanese piece The Man Who Couldn’t Leave was at Venice in 2022), showcasing the different facets of virtual, mixed and augmented realities. As we mentioned in our overview of the XR program, there’s room for improvement on the technical side, but as an inaugural foray into that world it showed great promise, with the potential to become one of the more interesting sidebars in years to come, particularly when it comes to giving a platform to Egyptian artists working in this field.

For the last six years, five different artistic directors have worked in the festival. As the position has to be approved by the Ministry of Culture every year, the continuity of Tarek and his programming team will be essential to establishing a curatorial voice that is unique to Cairo, one that is able make a change on the rapidly transforming film scene in the Middle East.

Golden Pyramid Award For Best Film
Dragonfly
Director: Paul Andrew Williams

Silver Pyramid for Best Director
Tarzan and Arab Nasser
Once Upon a Time in Gaza

Bronze Pyramid Special Jury Prize
As We Breathe
Director: Seamus Alton

Naguib Mahfouz Award For Best Screenplay
The Things You Kill
Directors, screenplay: Alireza Khatami

Best Actor Award
Maid Eid
Once Upon a Time in Gaza

Best Actress Award – ex aequo
Andrea Riseborough
Brenda Blethyn
Dragonfly

Henry Barakat Award For Best Artistic Contribution
Cinematography: Matthew Giombini
Sand City
Director: Necmi Sancak

Youssef Sherif Rizkallah Audience Award 
One More Show
Directors: Mai Saad, Ahmed El Danaf

HORIZONS OF ARAB CINEMA COMPETITION

Saad Eldin Wahba Award for Best Arabic Film
Dead Dog
Director: Sara Francis

Salah Abu Seif Special Jury Prize
Anti-Cinema
Director: Ali Saeed

Best Screenplay Award
Complaint No. 713317
Director, screenplay: Yasser Shafiee

Best Acting Award
Afaf Ben Mahmoud
Round 13

NETPAC AWARD FOR BEST ASIAN FEATURE FILM
The Botanist
Director: Jing Yi

BEST ARAB FEATURE FILM AWARD
Once Upon a Time in Gaza
Director: Tarzan and Arab Nasser

Special Mention
Flana
Director: Zahraa Ghandour

The International Critics Prize (FIPRESCI)
The Things You Kill
Director: Alireza Khatami

SHORT FILMS COMPETITION

Youssef Chahine Award for Best Short Film
Cairo Streets
Director: Abdullah Al-Taye

Best Arab Short Film Award
Two Tetas
Director: Lene El Safah

Watch It Special Jury Prize
A Very Straight Neck
Director: Nyo Sora

INTERNATIONAL CRITICS WEEK COMPETITION

Shady Abdel Salam Award for Best Film
Habibi Hussein
Director: Alex Bakri

Fathi Farag Special Jury Prize
My Parents’ House
Director: Tim Elrich

Special Mention
The Botanist
Director: Jing Yi

DOCUMENTARY FILM AWARD
Souraya Mon Amour
Director: Nicolas Khoury

Festival President Hussein Fahmy opened the proceedings by stressing the festival’s commitment to nurturing new voices, noting that “support, visibility, and resources are essential to sustaining the future of Arab cinema.” 

CID Director Mohamed Sayed Abdel Rahim echoed this sentiment, emphasising the importance of championing talents who have grown up in the festival’s ecosystem: actors, directors, and critics whose careers have been shaped by their ongoing presence at CIFF.

Representing The Film Verdict, writer Adham Youssef underscored the significance of celebrating talent at a time when filmmaking conditions across the region continue to shift rapidly. The Next Generation Awards honour exceptional contributions from filmmakers, actors, and critics who shape and document the evolving cinematic landscape of the Arab world, he said.

This year’s Next Generation Awards were presented to three emerging artists and one distinguished film professional whose careers reflect the dynamism and diversity of contemporary Arab cinema, Sayed Abdel Rahim announced.

Pres. Fahmy added that initiatives like the Next Generation Awards, the Cairo Pro-Meet programme, and Cairo Pro-Meet are essential to the mindset of the festival to enable the new generation of filmmakers and critics. 

Egyptian actress Nahed El Sebai was recognised for her remarkable screen presence and her commitment to portraying emotionally complex characters. She first gained major recognition in Basra (2008), followed by standout performances in 678 (2010) and Yousry Nasrallah’s After the Battle (2012), which screened in competition at Cannes.

Nasrallah was present to congratulate El Sebai, asserting her ability to shift seamlessly between realism, humour, and psychological nuance in her work. 

Her latest film, Pasha’s Girls, premiered this year in CIFF’s Horizons of Arab Cinema competition and is set for commercial release soon.

Egyptian critic Ahmed Ezzat Amer was honoured for his wide-ranging contributions to Arab film criticism. His work appears on mutiple platforms and he has served on selection committees for major festivals. He is a member of the Egyptian Film Critics Association, and the author of books about Yousry Nasrallah and Ildiko Enyedi.  This year, CIFF paid tribute to Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi, screening several of her films—making Amer’s honour especially resonant.

Lebanese actress and multidisciplinary artist Chirine Karameh received the award following her acclaimed performance in Dead Dog, directed by Sarah Francis. The film premiered earlier this year at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and competed in CIFF’s Horizons of Arab Cinema Competition. Karameh began her artistic journey in theatre and in dance, developing a fluid, multidisciplinary approach to character-building.

The award for directing went jointly to Egyptian filmmakers Mai Saad and Gazan cinematographer and director Ahmed Al Danaf, co-directors of the feature documentary One More Show. The film is competing in CIFF’s Main Competition, marking a significant achievement for both filmmakers.

Saad began her career as an assistant director before moving into producing, working on both documentary and narrative projects. One More Show is her feature-length documentary directorial debut.

Al Danaf, currently based in Gaza, shot the film amid the immense challenges of working in the besieged territory. Due to current conditions, he participated in the awards event via video chat, sending a message highlighting the importance of filmmaking as an act of cultural survival. His short film School Day, part of the From Ground Zero project organised by Rashid Masharawi, won the Youssef Chahine Award at CIFF 2024 and continues to screen internationally.

Last year’s honorees included  Egyptian director Hani Khalifa, Saudi film critic and journalist Ahmed Al-Ayyad, Egyptian director and screenwriter Noha Adel, and Jordanian actress Rakeen Saad. By recognizing talents from Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine, The Film Verdict and CIFF reaffirm their shared commitment to strengthening artistic voices from the Middle East and North Africa. At a moment when the regional film landscape faces both unprecedented challenges and new creative possibilities, the Next Generation Awards stand as a reminder that the future of Arab cinema lies in the hands of those who continue to reinvent it on screens, on sets, and in the pages of criticism.

Category: Established Talent

And the winner is: NAHED EL SEBAI

Nahed El Sebai, born on 25 May 1987, is an Egyptian actress known for her expressive screen presence and her commitment to roles that explore the emotional and social complexities of contemporary Egyptian life. Coming from a prominent artistic family—she is the granddaughter of legendary actor Farid Shawqi—El Sebai carved out her own distinct path in both cinema and television.

She gained early recognition with Basra (2008), followed by standout performances in 678 (2010) and Yousry Nasrallah’s Cannes-selected After the Battle (2012). Her work in Ali, the Goat & Ibrahim (2016) further showcased her range and ability to move fluidly between realism, comedy, and psychological drama. On television, she is best known for her nuanced role in Bint Esmaha Zat, where she captured the intimate transformations of an Egyptian woman over decades. Throughout her career, El Sebai has remained drawn to characters caught between personal desire and societal pressure, earning a reputation as one of the most compelling actresses of her generation.

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Category: Film Critic

And the winner is: AHMED EZZAT AMER

Ahmed Ezzat Amer is an Egyptian film critic who has written for numerous online platforms and film publications, including Ida2at, Midan Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera Documentary, Chrome, and Al Film Magazine. He has served on viewing committees for several film festivals, including El Gouna Film Festival and the Ismailia International Festival for Documentary and Short Films.

He is the author of “The Cinema of Yousry Nasrallah: Stories that Long to Embrace the World” and “The Cinema of Ildiko Enyedi: So That Magic Does Not Die in the World.”

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Category: Acting

And the winner is:  CHIRINE KARAMEH

Chirine Karameh is an actress and multidisciplinary artist. Her return to her artistic career was marked by her leading role in Dead Dog, directed by Sarah Francis, which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. She began her journey in theatre, performing under renowned directors such as Roger Assaf, Siham Nasser, Jana El Hassan, and Georges Hachem, and acting alongside celebrated performers including Antoine Kerbage.

A former dancer trained in classical ballet, modern and contemporary dance, she has evolved through multiple artistic disciplines. Chirine also holds an MSc in Psychology from the University of Roehampton in London and is a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society. Her background in psychology deeply informs the way she builds her characters. Having lived between Beirut, Montreal, Brussels, London, Manila, and Tokyo, she embraces a global perspective that shapes her artistic vision.

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Category: Directing

And the winners  are:

MAI SAAD

Mai Saad is an Egyptian filmmaker and producer. She began her career as an assistant director, working on several feature films, and short films. She served as assistant director on the films The Island (2007) and Cousins (2009). She is currently producing a feature- documentary and working as a creative producer on a feature narrative film. One More Show marks her directorial debut in documentary filmmaking.

AHMED AL DANAF

Ahmed Al Danaf is a cinematographer and filmmaker from Gaza whose short film, School Day, won the Youssef Chahine Award at CIFF 2024 and went on to screen internationally. One More Show marks the feature documentary directorial debut of both Saad and Al Danaf.

Shot on location during the actual 2024 Olympics, the film shows a woman (Blandine Madec, reprising her role from The Summer Holidays) arriving in Paris right in the middle of the sports-induced chaos in the month of August. Blandine, who hails from Normandy and is not used to the big city life, struggles to get settled in at first as she has to navigate the realities of finding – and keeping – a place to stay at a time when the population increases exponentially (sort of like attending a major film festival).

But the Olympic Games are not the only reason Blandine is in the French capital. In fact, they’re not even the main reason, no matter how much she insists otherwise. What actually gives her joy during this trip is getting to reconnect with her half-sister Julie (India Hair), with whom she hasn’t had any real contact in ten years, and meet her young niece Alma (Lou Deleuze) for the first time. As she juggles new and old relationships, Blandine slowly figures out how to get by in a world so alien to her, while the athletic frenzy dominates the entire city.

Madec, in her second feature film performance, is a subdued revelation with her sunny disposition and naturalistic style, her lack of fame making her the ideal person to follow around as she interacts with the very real 2024 Paris in a believably touristy way. She blends in with ease, becoming one with the portrait of a city that’s even busier than usual and injecting her outsider experience into the mix, making the film feel less Parisian than it technically is. Perhaps due to her own experience in front of the camera, Cadic gets perfectly calibrated work out of everyone: all the characters feel lived-in, and even India Hair, the one cast member with a modicum of celebrity status, disappears completely into the role of Julie, coming across as part of the family rather than some sort of guest star who may have felt like stunt casting in a different kind of project.

Though set towards the potentially melancholic end of the summer, the film remains a very breezy affair, its 75 minutes conveying a sense of free-spiritedness where fiction and reality intermingle effortlessly. It’s a warm and charming piece of independent filmmaking where a huge event becomes a delightful excuse to just hang out with an unconventional family for little over an hour. And by the time we’re done, we kind of wish we could stay with them a little longer.

Director: Valentine Cadic
Screenwriter: Mariette Désert
Cast: Blandine Madec, India Hair, Arcadi Radeff, Matthias Jacquin, Lou Deleuze, Béryl Gastaldello
Producers: Arnaud Bruttin, Antoine Jouve, Masa Sawada
Cinematography: Naomi Amarger
Production design: Sarah Jane Morelli
Music: Saint DX
Sound: Olivier Goinard
Production companies: Comme des Cinémas, Cinq de Trèfle Productions
World sales: Urban Sales
Venue: Cairo International Film Festival (International Critics’ Week Competition)
In French
75 minutes

The inaugural edition of Cairo’s XR is housed in the Hanager building, a stone’s throw from the festival’s main screening venue at the Opera House. Unlike its counterparts at other festivals, where each experience has its own space isolated from the rest, the Cairo version is structured like a single, long experience, where the user walks from one installation to the next along a predetermined path. It’s an intriguing choice, albeit one that makes the online booking system, where reservations are made in half-hour chunks, a bit baffling since some of the experiences run far longer than that (for comparison, the booking of the aforementioned Rotterdam and Venice programs is based on the individual installations).

Some technical kinks are also still in need of being worked on, particularly one experience that requires the user to download an app (a detail that is not mentioned in the project’s description on the festival website or in the catalogue), but those are normal growing pains for this inaugural foray into the world of virtual realities. And it is quite fitting that, after the first segment of Agnes Michalczyk’s Augmented Walls (where the app tells the story of the street art taken from Cairo’s Al Khalifa neighborhood), the work that eases the viewer into this universe is a relatively straightforward short film.

Said film is called Rebuilding Gaza, and it plays on a 360-degree screen. Dialogue-free and running three minutes, it imagines, via CGI, how the war-torn region may be reconstructed in the future, giving a certain visual poignancy to a very delicate subject. Directed by Karim Moussa, it’s one of four Egyptian projects in the XR lineup (out of seven experiences in total), Augmented Walls being one of the other three.

From there we move on to the third piece, Doaa Darwish’s In the Blink of Light. The most conceptually intriguing experience on display at the festival this year, it’s situated in a room wrapped in darkness, where the user is asked to illuminate a contraption with a flashlight. Depending on the area hit by the light, a screen on the wall shows fragments of images, sounds and texts, representing the fragility of memory and what we choose to retain or leave unseen and unheard. It’s a powerful slice of minimalism, conveying a lot with a very simple set-up.

The last four projects share the same larger space within the room, a slightly awkward logistical choice since one of them is designed for four users simultaneously. This is the final Egyptian experience on offer, called Timebound: Whispers of Osiris. The 90-minute duration may feel punishing for those who are not interested in the gaming component of immersive projects, but it should appeal to fans of escape rooms, as the concept is applied to a Pharaoh’s tomb where the players must solve various puzzles before their time runs out.

The other game hails from Belgium and is much simpler in execution: Ives Ageman’s Wall Town Wonders enables the user to transform their virtual living room into a proper town, filled with miniature characters. It’s a fun little example of mixed reality playfulness and, alongside the Egyptian escape room, the most fun one can have in that final stretch of the XR journey, as the remaining two installations, both previously shown in Venice, are – to differing degrees – a bit on the heavier side.

Bodies of Water, a Canadian creation, revolves around the user being in a 360-degree virtual environment that recreates the bottom of a swimming pool, where one observes as other bodies enter the pool and undergo a transformation, culminating in an enthralling dance. Bodies also play a role in The Man Who Couldn’t Leave, but with no dancing involved: the viewer is (not quite literally) thrown into a prison cell and listens to the recollections of A-Kuen and his friend A-Ching, two political detainees who suffered at the hands of the persecution occurring in Taiwan in the 1950s. This was the final experience this writer chose as part of the XR viewings, making it particularly apt to then reconnect with the outside world after all that time spent inside the Hanager building.

The events recounted in the screenplay by Hassan Benjelloun and Ali Benjelloun  transpire in a traditional stone village in Goundafa, an arid region near Marrakesh and the Atlas mountains, where the villagers enjoy a happy, carefree life sowing seeds and singing folk songs. Their innocent joy is overturned when the mosque’s new Fkih takes an ultra-hard line to music, dance and even puppetry. Preaching to the village men that these are all sins and must be eradicated, the imam (a sinister Abderrahim El Maniari) holds sway by extension over their wives and children. Nevertheless there is pushback, especially on the part of three young musicians who are about to sign a reording contract.

The film opens on a puppet show in which Riffian (Farouk Aznabet) tells a progressive fable about a greedy rich man. This is how he earns his living, but on the imam’s orders he burns his puppets and, in a shocking scene, brands his son Said’s mouth with a hot poker so he will be unable to play his flute. Tragedy ensues, but the tension is lacking to grip audiences with much more than a sense of indignation. Even that is quickly dissipated.

As singing and music-making vanish from the village, so does the source of income for many families. Meanwhile, new sins are added to the list: television, football matches, cards, much to the dismay of the local restauranteur. Also outlawed is marrying the woman you love, as Said was about to do, on the grounds her mother is a widow. The atmosphere is dark and glum until the women of the village band together and, taking a tip from ancient Greek comedy, refuse to cook or sleep with their husbands until things loosen up. But then another tragedy strikes, calling on the mother Fadma (played with real acting skill by Fatima Attif) to make a solitary journey to Casablanca to bury the body when her husband refuses.

In spite of the narrative switchovers, Benjelloun extracts true emotion in the film’s final scenes where it is again the women who cut through the aura of the town’s tin-plated false prophet and follow the real traditions of Islam. It opens the story up for a melodic and soulful choral love song, a valuable interlude that reinforces the message that music can be divine.

Director: Ali Benjelloun
Screenwriters: Ali Benjelloun, Hassan Benjelloun, with Hugues Nonn
Producer: Hassan Benjelloun
Cast:  Fatima Attif, Farouk Aznabet, Abdellatif Atif, Karima Gouit, Aziz Dhequir, Jamal Taamart, Amina Elliq, Mohamed Aduragh, Zahia Ez-Zahery, Said Darif, Abderrahim El Maniari, Khadija Sakarine, Zahra El Mahboul
Cinematography: Hamza Benmoussa
Production design: Abderrahim Abat El Mostafa Lehmidi
Costume design: Abdelouahab Benhaddou Malika Aakil
Editing: Ilias Lakhmasse
Music: Marat Faizullin
Sound: Mehdi Marhoum El Filali, Adil Aissa
Production companies: Bentaqerla Productions
Venue: Cairo Film Festival (Horizons of Arab Cinema )
In Arabic
96 minutes

Starting in the 1940s, he worked as a screenwriter shaping what is now known as Egypt’s realist cinema, contributing to its most enduring screenplays. As a novelist, his stories, dialogue, and plots provided filmmakers with a bottomless archive of material, narrating stories rooted in Cairo’s streets and alleys, exploring moral ambiguity and conflicts that go beyond the usual poles of tradition and modernity. Around 28 films were adapted from Mahfouz’s novels, the majority translating his themes of social inequality, psychological fragmentation, and spiritual crisis into cinematic language.

This year the Cairo Film Festival is screening seven restored films written or adapted by Mahfouz in an extensive programme that features 22 Egyptian classic films. The restored classics that showcase Mahfouz’s work include Cairo 30 (1966), adapted from his novel Cairo Modern; Khan al-Khalili; Palace Walk, adapted from Bayn al-Qasrayn (the first volume of The Cairo Trilogy); Palace of Desire, adapted from Qasr al-Shawq (the second volume of the trilogy); The Beggar, adapted from Al-Shahhadh; The Mirage, adapted from Al-Sarab; The Quail and Autumn, adapted from Al-Summan wal-Khareef; and The Road, adapted from Al-Tariq.

In addition to the classics, his cinematic influence is present in this year’s Short Film Programme. Egyptian director Abdel Wahab Shawky is premiering his short The Last Miracle, which was supposed to open last year’s El Gouna Film Festival but was censored by Egyptian authorities, with no explanation, at the last minute. It will see its world premiere in Cairo, where the film’s stort unfolds.

Still from The Last Miracle

The inspiration for the film comes from Mahfouz’s short story The Miracle from the collection The Black Cat Tavern. The screenplay is written by Mark Lotfy and Abdelwahab Shawky and is Shawky’s debut short. The story follows Yehia, who came to Cairo to become a poet but instead became a journalist. Played brilliantly by Khaled Kamel, the character sits inside a dimly lit bar and receives a call from a man claiming to be a holy person, informing him that he is “the chosen one.” Depressed and full of despair, Yehia quickly believes this message and convinces himself of its truth.

In the film, Shawky questions this fragile belief but allows viewers to see the temptation one might feel when told they are a person of “miracles” to abandon the mundane job of writing newspaper obituaries and become a beloved figure in a Sufi order—the only one who can communicate with the “holy man”. Yehia’s insecurities and are beautifully shown in this film, a powerful contender for the Youssef Chahine Award which is given to the Best Short Film at CIFF. Filmed in Cairo’s historic cemeteries, Shawky’s film will be screened in the legendary Ewart Hall at the old campus of the American University in Cairo, very close to the Cine Radio, one of the oldest cinemas in the country where dozens of Mahfouz’s films were screened.

Inside the Egyptian Opera House — which is 10 minutes walk from Tahrir Square, the birthplace of the 2011 Egyptian revolution where almost half a million people demanded Bread, Freedom and Social Justice — the festival is screening Cairo 30 (1966), adapted from the novel Cairo Modern. This masterpiece directed by the father of Egyptian realism, Salah Abu Seif, imagines a socialist solution to Egypt’s eternal problems: class struggle, societal decay, and corruption. It is the early 1930s after the death of influential nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul and the appointment of Ismail Sidqi as prime minister, which transformed the “liberal” era of Egyptian politics into a scene of factionalized parties competing to form a government. Ironically, in the same month that Cairo 30 is screening again in cinemas, Egypt has annulled the results of the first round of November parliamentary elections across seven governorates due to severe violations, including illegal campaigning.

Still From Cairo 30 (1966)

Another example of films that use politics to highlight their message is Houssam El-Din Mustafa’s The Quail and Autumn (1967), which explores the existential crisis of a man forced to leave political life after the 1952 revolution. Meanwhile the gem by Houssam El-Din Mustafa is The Beggar (1973), a compelling exploration of existential crisis and disillusionment, tradition and progress.

Almost 20 years after his death, Mahfouz’s legacy continues to be present on the Egyptian cultural scene. It is not controversy alone that makes his work — and its influence on artists and filmmakers — unique, but its ability to mirror societal disease, institutional anxieties, and individual aspirations through stories that still speak to the fragility and resilience of everyday Egyptian life.

At the center of it all is Hélène (Zeneb Blanchet), who abandons her comrades in arms after a botched attack and flees into the forest. There, she runs into Manon (Karelle Tremblay), a double of sorts, who leads her into a mysterious valley where transformation is constant and everything is open to interpretation. For Hélène, it becomes a journey of self-questioning, as she looks back on her past and the dilemmas – moral, political and human – that played an integral part in shaping it.

The plot elements described above may seem at odds with the film’s 72-minute duration, but the premise is actually just an excuse for Dufour-Laperrière to let his visual flights of fancy run wild. Sure, the philosophical dialogue remains a constant, but the director is not really interested in the plot in the strictest sense of the term. Once Hélène runs into Manon, the propulsive momentum of the opening stretch gets out of the way, and the valley where nothing is what it seems takes over.

More than anything, it’s a major showcase for the work of the animators from Miyu Productions, a studio whose versatility has been on display in recent years in movies such as Chicken for Linda! (2023) and fellow Quinzaine alum Ghost Cat Anzu (2024). Here, the style is painterly and surrealist, with a remarkable eye for detail and a penchant for bending our notion of what is actually happening right in front of us. The struggle may be internal for the protagonist, but Dufour-Laperrière’s imagination is very much out in the open for everyone to see.

Of course, this may prove a bit too vague for viewers expecting a more linear evolution of what was laid out in the beginning, while fans of the more visually driven sequences could, on the flipside, object to the heavy-handed soul-searching and class war evoked in the spoken words, of which there are many. The two opposites never fully attract in an entirely satisfactory way, but the mixture is undoubtedly a fascinating one, equal parts infuriating, bewildering and utterly hypnotic.

The title may have predictably philosophical connotations, but in the context of an industry driven into a panic by recent transformations tied to the use of artificial intelligence, it’s also a vibrant celebration of life. And not just any life – the life and liveliness of the human beings who injected every fiber of their being into every single frame, painstakingly crafting a world that, for all its rationality-defying characteristics, looks and feels real. As in, made by hand, not by prompt. In the microcosm that is Miyu Productions, the death of animation does not exist.

Director, Screenwriter: Félix Dufour-Laperrière
Cast: Zeneb Blanchet, Karelle Tremblay, Mattis Savard-Verhoeven, Barbara Ulrich, Françoise L., Marie B., Félix Dufour-Laperrière
Producers: Nicolas Dufour-Laperrière, Félix Dufour- Laperrière, Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, Pierre Baussaron
Music: Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière
Sound: Olivier Calvert, Samuel Gagnon-Thibaudeau
Production companies: Embuscade Films, Miyu Productions
World sales: Best Friend Forever
Venue: Cairo International Film Festival (International Competition)
In French
72 minutes

Her filmography shows Abbass’s achievement is not that of a single individual, but a collective effort to champion Palestinian voices and talent, and to embody the endurance of her people in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the worldwide diaspora.

The Cairo festival postponed its 2023 edition in solidarity with the Palestinian people and dedicated a whole spotlight on Palestine in 2024. This year it features eight projects that echo the resilience of Palestinians around the world and give Palestinian artists a voice to tell their own stories.

After touring world festivals and winning the directing prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, Tarzan and Arab Nasser screened their film Once Upon a Time in Gaza in Cairo. There is power in giving Gaza a visual profile that transcends the unfortunate image of a war-torn city. The film takes place in 2007, weeks before the Gaza Strip came under the control of Hamas, and investigates, through a thriller story, how the city’s social fabric began collapsing under siege.

Attention to atmosphere, rather than narrative urgency, gives the film an edge that is rare among Palestinian feature films. It is firmly in the tradition that the brothers have maintained since their 2015 film Dégradé and their 2020 romance Gaza Mon Amour, all of which celebrate Palestinian everyday life, with all its hardships, laughs, absurdities, and violence. In Once Upon a Time in Gaza, the working-class coastal city of Gaza—its slang, architecture, routines, humor, hardships, resilience, and corruption—is the main protagonist. As the camera lingers on normal street interactions, the Nasser brothers are able to capture the texture of the everyday that the wars (2008–2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021) later erased.

Tarzan and Arab Nasser are examples of how non-Western filmmakers can not only combat stereotypical images of where they come from, but also challenge the expectations international festivals and funders have of filmmakers from the MENA region.

A strong addition to Horizons of Arab Cinema this year, and competing for the Best Documentary Award, is Palestinian on the Road, an essay-documentary and pilgrimage film that begins from the private journey of the director and opens a collective cartography of Palestinian dispossession. Ismail Al-Habbash, a veteran in presenting Palestinian cinema worldwide, starts this journey by remembering how he could not accompany his wife Salam when she was battling cancer, up until her death in a Jerusalem hospital. He had applied for a permit to cross into Jerusalem, but permission came after she died.

This road film, which follows the path of Jesus Christ from Nazareth to Jerusalem, becomes a political reflection, as each station of grief and site on the map has been contested for decades, if not centuries. However, in this soft-hearted documentary, Al-Habbash does not seek a miracle, but investigates the very idea of miracle under occupied Palestine.

In his journey, Al-Habbash stops in Jenin, and so does Alex Bakri in his new documentary Habibi Hussein. The film follows Hussein Darby, the final projectionist of Cinema Jenin, as he tries to repair a 50-year-old projector, a gesture that feels like retrieving a world that is already gone.

Although the film is not nostalgic, Habibi Hussein attempts to cast a critical eye at the film infrastructure that has collapsed in places like Jenin. Shot in 2008, the film is not just a metaphor for the many aspects of Palestinian culture that have been demolished over the years. It also sheds light on the work of foreign NGOs in the West Bank. In the film, the cinema becomes the property of a German NGO, which enables Darby to return to his old job, which he did for 43 years. As soon as the project starts, (it was featured in Marcus Vetter’s film Cinema Jenin), Darby is marginalized and eventually silenced. Habibi Hussein enters an unspoken territory of criticizing foreign NGOs operating in Palestine and, more importantly, documentaries made by foreigners about Palestine.

Mai Saad & Ahmed Eldanf’s One More Show follows a circus collective that continues performing and touring the destroyed streets in Gaza. Saad (an Egyptian filmmaker) and Eldanf (a Palestinian) place their storytelling in the fragile backstage space where performance is uncertain, and the audience is made up of children whose childhoods have been stolen. Their approach leans toward observational ethnography and minimal narration. The film quietly rejects the usual NGO narrative of art as resistance, and suggests that culture is not a response to violence, but something that exists irrespective of it; a form of time that runs parallel to war, not in reaction to it.

One cannot watch the children enjoying the performance of the Free Gaza circus troupe without thinking of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl in the Gaza Strip who was killed by Israeli forces during the Gaza war, along with six of her family members and two paramedics attempting to rescue her. Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, which premiered in Venice and received critical acclaim, reconstructs the hours during which Hind remained trapped inside a car surrounded by Israeli tank fire, speaking to paramedics who were unable to reach her. Through audio testimony, eyewitness accounts, and visual material drawn from news documentation and social media, the film uses Hind’s voice to convey the terror and helplessness of the situation.

Ben Hania preserves the child’s voice as evidence, memory, and indictment, and positions the audience as witnesses to systematic death. Another approach appears in Who Is Still Alive, a feature-length documentary by Nicolas Wadimoff, which features nine Gazans speaking about their lives before the war, what they lost, and how they resist being erased. Wadimoff, who has been documenting Gaza since the early 1990s and has supported Palestinian filmmakers for decades, emphasizes, through the film and its title, not who survived, but who remains living.

The film was originally intended to be shot in Switzerland, but its location was moved to South Africa because Palestinians from Gaza can enter without a visa, underlining global restrictions on Palestinian mobility. This relocation becomes part of the film’s meaning: Gaza is present even in its displacement. With a refusal to aestheticize atrocity, the film focuses on testimony and presence, and avoids archival and war footage, relying solely on voice, memory, description, and embodiment.

Among the countries that have remained supportive of the Palestinian cause for liberation and self-determination is Chile, where Andrés and Francisca Khamis Giacoman’s short documentary Baisanos takes place. By following the passionate world of Club Deportivo Palestino fans, the filmmakers, both Chilean and descendants of Palestinians, trace how travel, exile, homesickness, and solidarity are not site-specific cultural practices, but tools of survival in a diaspora—sometimes loudly, sometimes playfully, sometimes through football.

As part of the new Cairo XR Films program, Karim Moussa’s experimental project Rebuilding Gaza imagines post-war reconstruction as an architectural possibility, empowering the very concept of the future with architectural imagination.

Five weeks after the ceasefire, which took place on October 10 between Hamas and the Israeli government, the tragedy of the last war—and the ones before it—continues to bring in waves of solidarity and political resistance from individuals and institutions around the world. Cairo is only one place. And cinema is only one tool.

The film rejects politeness, respectability, and the sanitized gaze usually enforced on racialized communities in Western Europe, especially in Germany. The slow-burn drama is loud in its emotions, harsh in its criticisms, and brutally honest in its willingness to expose the violence (visible and invisible) that underlies life for many Black, Arab, and Turkish families in Germany. 

Noah presents an exceptional work of storytelling: tight, elegantly structured, and rich with dialogue that lands like punches. Every line matters. Every cut moves the story forward, making it a film to be endured and remembered.

The story is shaped around a single tragedy: the death of Noah Diallo, a young German Arab man who dies after a “police operation”, as it will be reported in German. That death is the narrative center of gravity, pulling in three parallel stories, all reflecting a different facets of the same wound.

Noah’s mother, Mariama, receives a call from the police investigations office on a cold Berlin night with snowfall. The film’s cinematography immediately demonstrates her state. Mariama’s drive to the hospital, murmuring Arabic prayers, fighting panic, answering calls from family members, captures the anguish of a parent, but also the specific, racialized horrors of navigating German institutions as an immigrant woman.

Despite the presence of a video documenting how Noah died (which we don’t see, but it is surely in the hands of the police) ,the investigation and autopsy start by trying to determine whether he died from  asthma or from drugs, the oldest trick in the book when dealing with police brutality. Sadly, the Arab audience will easily relate. The heartbroken mom keeps driving through the streets of Berlin, refusing both the depoliticization of the killing to downplay police responsibility and the martyrdom rhetoric her mother pushes.  She refuses to allow her son to be turned into a martyr. “He did not want to die,” she insists.

Her monologue about the “German dream” of learning the language, working hard, going to school, being useful and maybe you will be accepted, is one of the film’s most striking critiques. She describes a society that promises acceptance and belonging as a reward for obedience, while at the same time ensuring that full membership is never granted. The devastating conclusion: If Noah had been German, he would not have been killed.

Parallel to Mariama’s grief are Melek and Musa, whose storyline becomes the political and emotional heartbeat of the film. They only know about Noah from social media. Their conversations are by turns comedic, poetic, furious, and brutally honest. Their fury makes them imagine parallel worlds. Musa imagines a world where German names are always mispronounced, where Otto Von Bismark statues are destroyed and urinated on, where presidents do not exist, where immigrants are not stereotyped as drug dealers at parties. The absurdity of Musa’s monologues are a form of resistance, satire as survival.

A third thread follows Ibrahim, a German-Turkish police officer who is on a control raid to search ‘random’ suspects who happen to be all foreigners from Arab, Turkish, and Kurdish backgrounds. The police are on the move after a car is set on fire. And Ibrahim and his racist chief are deployed. Ibrahim is caught between community and institution. He is humiliated by his openly racist superior. As they grab and detain a female suspect who yells at them that she is German, the racist cop replies: “a hamster is not a horse just because he lives in a stable.” On the other hand, the suspects call Ibrahim a pork-lover and a traitor. His colleagues force him to speak German, threaten disciplinary action when he slips into Turkish, and treat him as disposable. 

Ibrahim ends up in a basement, where he is ordered to hunt down suspects. This leads to one of the film’s most brilliant scenes. Trapped on one side of a door, he finds himself speaking to the Turkish-German men he is meant to apprehend, who are trapped on the other. When Ibrahim mentions he is a Galatasaray fan, they laugh and tease him for being an aristocrat. They trade jokes about Mesut Özil, debating how “German” he is — just as German, they say, as the police officer and the suspects themselves. The moment turns acidic when one of the men says, “If I were really German, I wouldn’t be here.”

Stylistically, NOAH is memorable. Berlin is rendered as a fractured, freezing, over-lit maze of alleyways, car interiors, stairwells, and traffic stops. The lighting is anxious, and the framing is at times claustrophobic. The upside-down shots and handheld camera creates a state of disorientation which translates the emotional toll of racism and the feeling of hopelessness. By cutting between Mariama’s sorrow, Melek and Musa’s restless anger, and Ibrahim’s internal breakdown, the editing holds the three plots together in an uncompromising script.

“Do you know why Batman has a hole in his mask? So the police know he’s white,” jokes Malek, directing her pun to Musa. The brutally honest joke says a lot about racism in contemporary Germany. Walking nowadays in Berlin, a techno music crowd of young white Europeans dancing in a train on their way to a Berlin club would be lauded as a sign of Berlin’s vibrant night scene. But if a group of young German-Turkish men talk loudly or listen to music on their phones, they will be prey to police control, angry looks and “thank you, Merkel!’ comments.

Director, screenwriter: Ali Tamim
Cast: Joyce Sanha, Steven Sowah, Meriam Abbas, Dora Gürer, Nils Kahnwald, Oscar Hoppe, Luise Hart
Producer: Lisa M. Wischer
Cinematography: Lea Pech
Art Department: Henrike Heiland, Florence Stadelmann
Editor: Gerard Cañadas
Sound: Bertold Budig
Visual Effects: Sebastian Esposito
Gaffer: Arne Weiß
Production Manager: Hana Petersen
Costume Design: Marilena Büld
80 Minutes
In German, Arabic, Turkish

Brockhaus, whose credits include On the Other Side of Life, Some Things Are Hard to Talk About and The Poetess, never appears in the film as more than an offscreen voice, but her presence is strongly felt as the interlocutor listening to and sympathizing with Azza’s heartfelt introspection. Female empathy is a strong current running through the loosely woven scenes and the bond of friendship between director and subject encourages candor and trust.

Dressed in black, like the young woman riding beside her, Azza sits behind the wheel of her rugged SUV discussing how bad other drivers are. Men are especially arrogant when they see a woman is driving, and Azza wastes no time putting the driver of the car in front of her in his place. It’s a well-chosen intro to the protagonist’s world view and her utter refusal to be put down because of her gender, underlined by a few bars of humorous music.

The story of Azza’s marriage and divorce forms a large part of who she is, and as she meets various members of her family a painful drama of violence and betrayal comes out. She was 16 and deep into her studies when her father decided she had enough schooling and needed to get married. When she refused his choice of a husband, he drew a knife on her. She married the man for her family’s sake but it was a disaster. Many children and beatings later, Azza demanded a divorce and obtained it — after driving off with her husband’s car and threatening to demolish it if he didn’t give her the divorce. He gave it to her – but kept all the kids.

This back-and-forth saga of suffering and one-upmanship rings so true to life that Azza’s story never slips into the maudlin register of victimhood, though some of the mistreatment she describes brings tears to her eyes. Then she wipes them away and vows to overcome the bad cards she has been dealt. It anguishes her that, with all her skills, she can’t get a well-paying job, one that would permit her to live with her four original kids as well as the baby girl she had with her second spouse Maher — all because she doesn’t have a college degree. Then she promises fiercely, “I’ll have my own academy one day.”

It is a rather breath-taking portrait of modern-day Saudi Arabia, where the trad wife role, in one of its most oppressive incarnations, is in rapid evolution. Azza doesn’t neglect to mention the change in laws in 2017 which allowed women to rent apartments in their own name for the first time.

Perhaps even more amazing is the utter freedom Azza shows in nature, where she is most herself. Getting Maher’s reluctant permission to spend four days traveling around the desert with the film crew, Aza discovers a world of beauty she never knew existed. Behind the wheel of her four wheel drive SUV she cuts figures in the sand and fixes small emergencies, proud that she has done it herself without asking for help. At one point, she jumps out of the car into a sudden shower, soaking up the rain and exclaiming, “I’m happy!” These moments are accompanied by Amélie Legrand’s soft, joyful score that conveys her optimism.

In counterpoint to the light-hearted music is the swiftly unfolding action, edited by Ulrike Tortora as a kaleidoscope of images in motion – driving, riding horses, herding camels, extracting an ancient agate from a prehistoric rock. The high quality cinematography, credited to Anne Misselwitz and Brockhaus, is crisp and visceral, giving an epic sense to the endless stretches of highway cutting through sand dunes, and turning the deep blacks of the night into a warm envelope for women brave enough to sleep under the stars.

Director, screenplay: Stephanie Brockhaus
Cast: Azza Al Shareef
Producer: Hans Robert Eisenhauer
Cinematography: Anne Misselwitz, Stefanie Brockhaus
Editing: Ulrike Tortora
Music: Amélie Legrand
Sound: Michael Hinreiner, Kirsten Kunhardt
Production companies: Ventana Films
Venue: Cairo Film Festival (Horizons of Arab Cinema)
In Arabic, English
89 minutes

When Siham, the mother, is gone, her husband Waguih and their son Namir are left to make sense of what their lives will be “after” her. Her presence continues to fill their house, their memories, and the pictures that Namir has taken for years. Simply put, Life after Siham is the director’s attempt to keep a promise he made to his mother to make a “real film with actors” instead of casting his family members in it. He works with a collage structure, mixing old photographs, new footage of his father, present-day vérité footage, Super 8 reels, and excerpts from Youssef Chahine films.

The emotional core of the film is the triangle between Namir, his mother, and his father. The father is reserved and clearly protecting himself with silence and distance. Bit by bit, Abdel Messeeh is able to get him to reflect on the story of his marriage, which started as a romance in the 1960s in Egypt and turned into a marriage in exile in France in the 1970s.

Much of the film is built from the material Namir gathered in the months after his mother’s death. He  starts by filming inside the family’s apartment in France, where his father, Waguih, now lives alone. The camera records the daily routines of a widower: silent breakfasts, the way he handles old photos or just sits in his chair thinking. These scenes form the emotional spine of the film, including ones where Namir pushes him gently into conversation, asking him about their early years in Cairo and how he met Siham. The grief of both men collides in the presence of the camera and becomes part of the documentary’s fabric.

Namir also travels to Egypt to film and understand the places and people that shaped his parents’ story. Starting with Cairo, he aims to trace the couple’s early life, their political activism, and the repression they were subjected to. Then he goes all the way to the south of Egypt (Upper Egypt) to film his aunt. Having directed The Virgin, the Copts and Me (2011), he is not a stranger to Copts living in Upper Egypt. As expected, the scenes there are looser, filled with warmth, honesty, some laughter, urban legends, and teasing — a freedom to speak in front of the camera that his father cannot do. There are topics like migration, separation, childhood, and Siham’s character, revealing parts of the family history that Waguih prefers not to discuss.

Throughout the film, the director uses old photographs and Super 8 reels to retell his parents’ story, brilliantly inserting scenes from Youssef Chahine’s The Return of the Prodigal Son and Dawn of a New Day, which he repurposes as “stand-ins” for moments in his parents’ life together. This choice is on target, practical, and poetic. It fills the gaps where no personal footage exists, especially moments of the parents’ youthful romance in Cairo, the tensions of exile, and the political pressure in the 1970s. It beautifully lets cinema act as filler for missing moments. In addition, it redefines documentary filmmaking as a medium that can borrow and sample existing films to express a past moment.

The hybrid territory which Namir creates by mixing different mediums allows him to get into the political context, which in many ways forced his family to emigrate from Egypt. His father was a leftist under the socialist-leaning president Nasser, but when the regime changed he paid a price under the capitalist-leaning Sadat. A Coptic Christian and a communist, Waguih found himself rejected for jobs and pushed out of academia. His exile in France is not presented here as a heroic choice but rather as a last resort to avoid imprisonment and further marginalization.

Living “after” Siham, the director is forced to conclude there is no clear “after.” His parents don’t simply vanish. Their existence passes into stories, pictures, and letters that they leave behind, and most importantly, they pass on their habits and bodies to their children and grandchildren. The filmmaker, like anyone grieving for a loved one, doubles back, contradicts himself, and lets memory remain unresolved.

Sound plays a subtle role in the documentary. The calm voice-over is often searching, hesitant, but never dictating. Songs drift through the film like Mohamed Abdel Wahab’s “Ya Musafir Wahdak” and Abdel Halim Hafez’s “Ana Lek ‘Ala Toul”, echoing gentle meanings about loyalty in love and longing for the beloved’s company.

Like many personal documentaries, the camerawork is modest, shot with handheld cameras with close framing, sometimes trembling, giving away how personal the material is, and showing that the filming is part of the story. Namir Abdel Messeeh does not pretend to be a neutral observer, as he often shows the retakes and the awkwardness between himself and his father, including the power dynamics and discomfort that come from being recorded.

Director, screenplay, producer: Namir Abdel Messeeh
Co-producer: Camille Laemlé 
Cinematography: Nicolas Duchêne
Editors: Benoît Alavoine, Emmanuel Manzano
Sound: Roman Dymny, Julien Sicart, Thomas Robert
Sound design: Roman Dymny
Music: Clovis Schneider
Production companies: Oweda Films, Les Films d’Ici
World sales, screening copy: Split Screen
Venue: Cairo Film Festival (Special Screenings)
In French, Arabic
80 minutes

He took on the role immediately, succeeding Essam Zakaria. He works alongside acclaimed actor Hussein Fahmy, who has a long history as president of the festival.

Tarek’s career includes film programming for various festivals such as Dublin International Film Festival, El Gouna Film Festival, and Cinema Akil in the UAE. He is also an alumnus of the Locarno Industry Academy in Beirut and the Durban Talents programme. His appointment comes as a promising testament to his knowledge of the festival’s audience and the hard mission of satisfying all tastes. Ever since his new role was announced during this year’s Berlinale, he and his team have been gearing up for the November festival since February, networking, forming a high level jury, and achieving a strong international presence.

Part of that international cooperation took place at Cannes in May, where CIFF shared a joint Egyptian pavilion in collaboration with the El Gouna Film Festival and the Egypt Film Commission (EFC), aimed to enhance the presence of Egyptian cinema on the international stage and in the prestigious Marché du Film. The Egyptian joint pavilion, Tarek said ”represents an ambitious return [to Cannes], with three major entities joining forces to support the Egyptian film industry. It served as a platform to introduce the two festivals and the commission, engage in discussions with other Arab film festivals on the future of Arab cinema, and highlight Egypt’s appeal as a filming destination.”

Consequently, Tarek started early in the year to build the team and define roles, “ensuring the programming would be varied and capable of attracting distinctive films.”

This year, Tarek and is programming team are betting on a notable group of names, including the Belgian director Marta Bergman with her film The Silent Run in its world premiere, and the Egyptian-Palestinian film titled One More Show by directors Mai Saad and Ahmed Al-Danaf.

“We are also presenting films from countries unfamiliar to Egyptian audiences, such as Zafzifa by Peter Sant from Malta, Kaffarah by Thanvir Chowdhury from Bangladesh, Noah by Ali Tamim from Germany, and Cotton by Rashid Malikov from Uzbekistan,” Tarek added.

Other films he believes enrich the programme are Pasha’s Girls from Mohamed Al Adel, and the documentary by the young Egyptian filmmaker Alaa Mahmoud, Triangle of Love.

“Egyptian cinema represents the beating heart of the festival,” Tarek asserts. “We work on highlighting contemporary Egyptian productions alongside restoring classic films and presenting them to new generations.”

“It is important for Egyptian filmmakers to feel that the festival provides them with a platform that places them within a cinematic movement that renews itself every year. For this reason, Egyptian films appear across various sections: fiction, documentary, and short films.”

Top titles shining in the selection include Once Upon a Time in Gaza by Arab and Tarzan Nasser, winners of the Best Director award at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard; the world premiere of Souraya, Mon Amour by Lebanese filmmaker Nicolas Khoury, a touching portrayal of Souraya, the widow of legendary filmmaker Maroun Bagdadi; and Calle Malaga by award-winning Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani.

Regarding programming, he explains, “This year, we were not concerned with having a large number of titles; rather, we focused on presenting films within a critical context that honors the festival’s audience.” He notes, “This edition includes 15 world premieres and participation from 40 countries, encompassing fiction, documentary, and short films. We also present 22 restored Egyptian classics,” along with “25 short films of various styles and forms, keeping the festival a space for both discovery and the preservation of classics.”

He sees the mission of the festival being to “champion Arab voices” and to allow these projects to be seen by the world. Yet this dedication to Arab cinema does not decrease CIFF’s prestige as an international festival. Tarek believes in the depth of the chosen titles, and not the number of international films included in the programme. “The impact of CIFF is its ability to promote Arab and Egyptian cinema, and this goes hand in hand with its international presence.”

This year, CIFF pays tribute to several Arab figures such as Egyptian actor Khaled El Nabawy, veteran filmmaker Mohamed Abdel Aziz, and cinematographer Mahmoud Abdel Samie. In addition two acclaimed female figures are honoured: Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi and French-Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass.

Tarek and his team take pride in celebrating talents that work to build bridges between cultures and countries. Khaled El Nabawy is an example of that, as is Hiam Abbas. Both have “an astonishing career that connects Arabic and global cinema.” Concerning Arab honorees, Tarek believes in the importance of making Cairo “a hub where Arab and Middle Eastern filmmakers are celebrated and acknowledged for their work in the Arab world and on the international scene.”

On the jury, Tarek says, “Choosing the internationally acclaimed director Nuri Bilge Ceylan to head the jury was a very natural decision,” describing him as “one of the world’s most prominent filmmakers and the recipient of major awards.”

For Tarek, the festival is an integrated ecosystem that cannot be judged from one angle. “If the films are the heart pumping blood, there are other organs that keep the body alive: organization, events, the audience, and the industry, “ he told The Film Verdict.

He believes the festival is not just a platform for screenings, but an interactive space for the film industry. “We pay special attention to the Cairo Industry Days (CID), which has become an important platform for developing Arab and African projects. It gives emerging talents opportunities to connect with international producers and distributors, and provides support programs that help transform ideas into actual films.”

“We aim to be the most influential and distinguished, but our goal is not ‘being number one’ in itself. It is a process; we don’t want to enter a race for rankings. We focus on the essence of competition: filmmaking.” He adds that the ambition is to have “a voice that is unique and influential, not just another figure in a festival race.”

Turning to the festival’s attendees: “The biggest challenge is the wide diversity of the festival’s audience.” For Tarek, programming for CIFF reflects Cairo’s diversity, from film students, cinephiles, international guests, filmmakers, local and international press to industry pros. “CIFF’s audience is diverse and possesses an advanced cinematic taste.”

“We have more than forty thousand attendees, some eagerly anticipating the official competition, while others look for the experimental works shown only here… So we were careful to create a balance without compromising the festival’s spirit or losing its identity. For me, the festival resembles an ‘open vision,’ written by cinematic spectrums that appeal to all tastes.”

It’s a fetching concept for a film and Abidi, who is also a producer and editor, carries the anonymity and dehumanization out almost too well, indulging in long sequences where office manager Ayda (Zeineb Melki) exhibits the empty, repetitive behavior that is the inevitable result of her on-the-job training in false and robotic emotions. We meet her breaking in a new recruit by giving the young woman a badge, headphones and her stage name Florence, which is the only name she is allowed to use on the phone. Furthermore, speaking Arabic is strictly forbidden: only French is allowed as the operators must pretend to be Europeans. But despite it all, the new girl (demurely played by Nour Hajri, who toplined in Nouri Bouzid’s harrowing 2019 Syrian drama, The Scarecrows) is ambitious and will rise in the ranks.

The floor of the call center, with its elbow-to-elbow operators chattering away, is overlooked by a Big Brother style control center where Ayda and the office supervisor Yahya (Mohamed Yahya Jaziri) can listen in on any conversation for quality control. It makes the heart sink when they catch the lonely operator Sophie accepting compliments from one of the callers and even making a dinner date. The film’s best line of dialogue falls to a disgruntled Sophie: “After ten years here I’ve gained nothing but weight.” Loneliness and alienation are major themes of the film, and not limited to these regimented office workers. There is Ayda’s mom who lives alone someplace distant, and the charming single lady who runs a fried food shop that Ayda frequents, desperate for companionship.

But as the film marches on, it seems that there might be a spark of affection trying to ignite between Yahya and Ayda. Neither one is exactly shy, but they are inhibited by the office rule that states employees can only have professional relationships. Even when Yahya takes the big step of leaving the company after ten years of a cold, dissatisfying life, he struggles to express his feelings to the equally emotionally handicapped Ayda. That night on her way home to her joyless apartment, she texts, “Yahya, I am going to miss you,” only to erase the words without sending them. No surprise – there is little that can’t be easily foreseen coming, which is one of the film’s big flaws – but the interaction between the two has a bittersweet, unspoken quality that comes close to being touching.

Change is coming, however, when the big boss lady appears on the scene. She first fetes the marvelous workers with a 10-year anniversary party, then tells Ayda to fire half of them and refuses to pay the rest. More isolated than ever without Yahya, Ayda is pushed to save either her job or her humanity, but seemingly not both.

The film’s modernist sets are heightened by soothing dark colors and strategic lighting that Ryzsard Karcz’s cinematography uses to bring out the anything-but soothing geometry of the streets and architecture. You know you’re in trouble when graffiti on the commuter train seems like a human touch.

Director, screenplay: Sarra Abidi
Cast: Zeineb Melki, Nour Hajri, Mohamed Yahya Jaziri, Yousr Galai, Fatma Felhi, Sondos Belhassen
Producers: Sarra Abidi, Ibtissem Abidi
Cinematography: Ryzsard Karcz
Costume design: Yosra Mzoughi
Music: Omar Aloulou
Sound: Moez El Cheikh, Yazid Chabbi
Production company: Synergy Productions
Venue: Cairo Film Festival (Horizons of Arab Cinema)
In French, Arabic
100 minutes

Shafiey brings back absurdity at the expense of absolute realism, and builds a world where material tension is tested. Complaint No. 713317 takes pleasure in filming the ordinary, silent frustrations of life with plenty of twists. In his previous short works The Dream of a Scene,  Intense Practice to Improve Performance and The Man Who Swallowed the Radio, absurdity is there to address realism. In his first feature, he brings back the comedy schools of veteran Egyptian filmmakers like Rafaat Al-Meehy.

Magdy and Sama, married for thirty-seven years, live in a modest Maadi apartment whose walls, furniture, and aging appliances silently testify to a life of repetition and emptiness. All hell breaks loose when Magdy tries to defrost the old fridge with a hammer and knife. What seemed like a routine domestic malfunction turns into a mirror reflecting the cracks in a long marriage.

Magdy has been retired from his job at the Ministry of Agriculture for years, and lives on a small pension. Meanwhile Sama is soon to retire also from her government job and will receive a nice sum as an end-of-service bonus, a fact that disrupts Magdy’s idea of gender roles. Sharihan and Heimedia are brilliant in acting out these characters. Sama is caring and warm, cleans the house and cooks oversalted soup, while Magdy moves with pride, never admits any mistake, lies to hide his errors, and never allows her to spend any of her money. 

When the old fridge goes belly up, he sticks to the long road of contacting a maintenance company (not because it’s practical but because it’s cheaper) while she wants to solve the problem by buying a new one, now that she can afford it.

Wanting to defuse the situation, and calm Sama’s desire to buy a new fridge, Magdy suggests they celebrate the couple’s 37th wedding anniversary with friends and their only family, their son (Ali El Tayeb). He, like the rest of the world outside their apartment, remains absent, once again unable to attend due to work. The cheesecake meant for the occasion, stored in the faulty fridge, has spoiled and everyone gets sick. Emad Maher’s editing brings out the humor of the scene. 

The experimental Kafkaesque comedy approach that Shafiey is moving with in the film is refreshing and welcome on the Egyptian film scene, where the majority of comedies are only based on punchlines and insults. The absurd maintenance company that Magdy calls offers the main course in Shafiey’s script. The company’s delusional staff and evasive manager (played by veteran comedienne Enam Salaousa) are driven by realities that Egyptians have to deal with amid terrible customer service culture and lack of accountability. The realism of the conversations, and the absurd meanings of it, give the film aitsedge and makes the laughs ring true. 

The film shifts into absurdist territory when that company enters the plot. This certified institution with their long waiting-call tones is a maze of overpricing, scams, and evasions. The deranged working class technician (played by Mohamed Radwan) calls himself an engineer and claims to have studied in the US, married an American woman, worked for NATO and the Ministry of Defence on submarines, and designed refrigerators from scratch. Radwan’s character is like the stranger you meet on the train who claims they had a steak with Gandhi and burned flags with Obama. As days stretch into months and the fridge remains unfixed, Magdy files a complaint at the Consumer Protection Agency. More bureaucracy is ahead for the couple. 

The film is set entirely inside a middle-class Cairo apartment and shot with an unwavering static camera. Cinematographer Karim Fouad Hakim highlights how the gender roles in Magdy and Sama’s house are taking a toll on their relationship, and how the fridge drama is putting salt on the open wound of a loveless marriage, economic deterioration, an absent son.

The production design is among the film’s most appealing achievements: the dusty, unused and old family PC, jewelry hidden in an old chocolate tin, a plastic stand for onions and potatoes, the plastic vegetable-shaped fridge magnets, and the once-golden 70s furniture. It is a precisely observed portrait of a middle-to-upper-middle-class Egyptian household that has not changed in years. Only the IKEA towels are off-note on an otherwise impeccable set.

Director, screenwriter: Yasser Shafiey
Cast: Mahmoud Hemida, Shereen, Hana Shiha, Mohamed Radwan, Hanan Youssef, Enam Salousa, Mohamed Abdo, Tamer Nabil, Ahmed Abdel Hamid, Gehad Hossam El Din, Ali El Tayeb.
Cinematography: Karim Fouad Hakim
Editor: Emad Maher
Producer: Rasha Gawdat
Production: Red Star Films, Misr International Films, Film Square Productions, and Filmology
Venue: Cairo Film Festival (Horizons of Arab Cinema)
80 minutes