by Helen Barlow at the Cairo International Film Festival
The awards of the 46th Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) have been announced, with British filmmaker Paul Andrew Williams taking out the top prize, the Golden Pyramid, for Dragonfly in the international competition, while the film’s stars Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn shared the best actress award. Jury president Turkish filmmaker and Cannes Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan cited the film’s “profound exploration of solitude, memory, and human resilience” as Riseborough’s Colleen befriends and helps her elderly neighbour, Blethyn’s Elsie, who is suffering after a fall and fails to get the help she needs from official carers.
The Palestinian Paris-based Nasser brothers’ Once Upon a Time in Gaza won the Silver Pyramid award for best director, as well as best actor for Majd Eid, and the best Arab feature film award. A very human drama, it’s set in Gaza in 2007 and follows Yahya, a young student who befriends falafel shop owner Osama (Eid), and they attract the attention of a corrupt police officer as they deal a small amount of drugs on the side.
Iranian filmmaker Alireza Khatami won the screenplay award and the FIPRESCI Prize for The Things You Kill, which follows a university professor looking into the suspicious death of his mother; while Lebanese filmmaker Nicolas Khoury won for best documentary with Souraya Mon Amour, which looks back on artist Souraya Baghdadi’s relationship with her filmmaker husband, Maroun Baghdadi, who suffered an accidental death two years after he won the 1991 Cannes jury prize for Out of Life.
Of course, Cairo is currently under siege by tourists and art/history lovers, who are visiting the newly opened Great Egyptian Museum (GEM), a spectacular showcase of Egyptian archaeological findings on a massive scale. On a tour there, we met Maltese-Australian filmmaker Peter Sant, whose second Maltese feature Zafzifa (following 2018’s Of Time and the Sea) had its world premiere in CIFF’s international competition. After growing up in Sydney and studying and working in London, the 50-year-old is now based in Malta, where so many blockbusters (most recently Gladiator II) are shot. With his new film, he wanted to showcase Malta, a small island nation with weather and natural beauty not dissimilar to Australia’s north. It now attracts many migrants, the focus of Zafzifa.
“Malta is changing in the contemporary fabric and diaspora and with the economic migrants arriving,” Sant says. “It’s kind of new. I’m not aware that anyone has tackled it in cinema so far. In terms of the construction and development, I’m very interested in this idea of progress, what progress actually means and towards what.”
Famously, there are more Maltese living in Australia than in Malta. The film notes how they immigrated to Australia for a better life. “My parents were migrants to Australia in the 1950s, and obviously it offered them a better way of life, a better income and a stable chance to build a family and build a house,” Sant notes. “Ultimately, my father returned to Malta to retire. Now the tables have turned, where people are coming to Malta from all around the world. It’s become a huge melting pot, so it’s a very interesting period.”
He says the film “kind of wrote itself” as he met immigrants and integrated their stories. His Greek lead actor Dimitrios Giannakoudakis had been living in Malta for some time, though had only played extras in Malta’s major productions. After his family deserts him, his Dimitrios character meets Filipino Annie (immigrant Crishelle Medrano) who is working as a carer for an old woman, played by Sant’s mother-in-law, Marylu Coppini, a famous Maltese stage actress, also known for the 1962 film Treasure in Malta.
“The film was like taking a snapshot of Malta, so it was important for me to use mostly non-actors and open sets,” Sant says. “We didn’t close off any streets or anything like that. It’s all open.”
Would Sant like to make films in Australia? “I would love to eventually, that’s my goal.” But he says for the moment, there are more opportunities through the Arts Council in Malta. “They’re willing to give people a chance, to let you make films and support you in that way. So that’s quite good. What also attracts me about Malta is that it’s a local film industry. It’s next to non-existent and they only recently started producing films. Although Malta has appeared on so many screens all over the world, in these massive blockbusters like Gladiator and Troy, it rarely appears as itself. In that sense, the local film industry is like a blank canvas, so it’s very easy to carve out a niche.”
Another film at the festival, Calle Malaga, Maryam Touzani’s third narrative feature, is Morocco’s official Oscar entry for international feature. Almodovar muse Carmen Maura plays a 79-year-old Spanish woman living in Tangier, who is devastated when her daughter arrives from Madrid to sell her home. Up for a fight, she does everything she can to keep her home and discovers love along the way.
CIFF, the A grade film festival for the Arab (MENA) region has been holding its ground despite the onslaught of the more highly funded Egyptian resort-based El Gouna Festival in October, the Doha Film Festival, which began even before CIFF finished, and the Saudi Red Sea Festival in December. CIFF also benefits from its huge 10 million+ population, who are keen to watch local fare.
One of the best Egyptian films was Complaint No. 713317, which screened in the Horizons of Arab Cinema section with Egyptian filmmaker Yasser Shafeiy winning the best screenplay prize for his first film. Set in an Egyptian household, the wryly humorous film follows a retired couple coping with small injustices after their refrigerator breaks down. The broken refrigerator becomes the symbol of a society trapped in an endless cycle of repairs and temporary fixes.
Some of the festival highlights were short films, which point to future talent. Mark Ayman [left], 24, believes that he is probably the youngest Egyptian to have had a film in the short film competition. His film Cone, aka the hard plastic implement used in traffic regulation, shows immense promise. Three years in the making, Cone stems from a personal story and began as his film school graduation project. Set in Cairo, a city dominated by cars, it bursts with the raw energy of Cairo’s streets.
“I’ve been living my whole life in Cairo, where everything in the street affects you,” Ayman says. “Cone is about the power dynamics between two social classes, a metaphor in terms of a self-righteous professor at a prestigious university and a garage worker, and how they have an argument around a traffic cone that is used to reserve spots in the public spaces for the garage workers’ clients. So, they are arguing about the use of the public space for personal reasons, and it turns into a rivalry that also explores themes of fake idealism and toxic masculinity.” Ultimately, he says, “it’s a genre film where we see the professor descend into madness.”
