Everything old was new again at this year’s Cairo Film Festival.
Filling out a super-sized 45th edition, the Egyptian event introduced a new section dedicated to heritage titles, showcasing 10 gems of world cinema, among them titles like “The Lonely Wife” and “The Color of Pomegranates” to mark the centenaries of film greats Satyajit Ray and Sergei Parajanov, as well as 4K restorations of “The Godfather Part II,” “The Thief of Baghdad” and “Cleopatra,” among several more.
As part of a bolstered Cairo Classics program, the festival also premiered 14 milestones of Egyptian cinema freshly remastered and reintroduced to an eager public. And as the Cairo Film Festival charts a new course under president Hussein Fahmy and artistic director Essam Zakarea, this restorative vocation will stay a cornerstone of their wider mission.
“Egyptian cinema is one of the oldest in the world, but we have a problem with our archive,” Zakarea tells Variety. “We’re losing historic films every month and every day, because the majority of classic Egyptian cinema has not yet been digitized. So we’ve taken it on ourselves to help change that.”
The festival soft-launched the Cairo Classics section in 2022 by debuting restorations of classics “Diary of a Country Prosecutor” from Tawfik Saleh and “A Song on the Passage” from Ali Abdel Khalek. The new section proved an immediate success, encouraging Fahmy, who took his festival post after six decades as one of Egyptian cinema’s leading matinee idols.
“The idea appealed to everyone,” says Fahmy. “It was a revelation for every spectator, so I thought, why don’t we restore even more titles?”
As a board member of Egypt’s Holding Company for Cultural and Cinematic Investment, Fahmy discovered a library of nearly 1,400 heritage titles that could benefit from a technological touch-up. And with both public and private supports at his disposal – and with the help of Egyptian Media Production City’s Audio-Visual Heritage Restoration Center – the festival president went about repairing, cleaning up and the subtitling some awfully damaged prints.
“Each restoration takes about E£100,000 [$2,014],” says Fahmy. “And the subtitles cost about E£20,000 [$402], so the cost really isn’t that much. [And by] subtitling these films, we can then offer them much wider exposure and distribution, so the project is really appealing both for me, and for the whole company.”
Among the first batch of titles readied and premiered at this year’s festival are four midcentury standouts from filmmaker Salah Abou Seif, among them “Cairo 30” and “The Thug,” as well as “Palace Walk” and “Palace of Desire” from director Hassan El-Imam – with nearly all of them based on the works of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.
While the screenings proved particularly successful in the suburban satellite cinemas where the Cairo Film Festival has sought to spread out, the festival president even heard echoes from further afield.
“After our opening screenings I received many demands from foreign countries,” says Fahmy. “We’re getting emails from everywhere, asking us to repair other damaged films in our local lab.”
“We try to look at our cinema as a living art,” adds Zakarea. “We don’t distinguish between old and new, because art doesn’t have a limited lifetime. It doesn’t get old – on the contrary, these classics seem to get younger and more powerful by the passage of time.”
