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The seventh edition of Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival wrapped over the weekend with the $50,000 top prize going to French director Jonathan Millet’s Syrian drama Ghost Trail, and its star Adam Bessa winning Best Actor.

See the full list of El Gouna winners below.

Launched in 2017 by Egyptian tycoon Naguib Sawiris in the Red Sea resort of El Gouna created by his brother Samih Sawiris, the festival’s early years were characterized by glitzy red carpets and parties and Hollywood guests such as Owen Wilson, Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal and Patrick Dempsey.

The festival has toned down the bling in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, sparked by the latter’s October 7 attack on southern Israel which killed more than 1,100 people, and resulted in the abduction of 253 people.

With the death toll in Gaza now topping 43,000 alongside dire warnings from aid agencies that the population of...

It is a good time for heritage cinema and for audiences thanks to technical advances in high resolution scanning, colour grading and restoration, agreed European and Middle Eastern execs at a roundtable hosted by Screen in association with the Saudi Film Commission, at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

“The experience and the emotion you get when you screen a movie that was restored and digitised from the original negatives is very new,” said Caroline Caruelle, managing director of France’s Cité de Mémoire. “It’s not like when you see a copy or a print copy being digitised.”

The...

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mandoob (The Night Courier), a darkly comedic thriller from Saudi Arabia, became one of the most successful film at the country’s box office just a few years after the 30-year ban on cinemas was lifted. Directed by Ali Kalthami, the film premiered at TIFF last year and became an instant hit with critics and festival goers.

Nominated for Best Feature at Zurich and taking the Audience Award at Torino, Mandoob is a gripping character portrait and rare glimpse into the underbelly of modern Saudi life.

Earlier this month, I spoke to Kalthami about Saudi Arabian cinema and its history, with a focus on the impact of censorship and the return of cinemas in recent years. We also focused on the filmmaking techniques used by the director and how he handles broaching an array of taboo themes through the medium of comedy and noir cinema.

Egyptian filmmaker Sara Shazli will be presenting her latest documentary, “Your Daughter,” during the Venice Production Bridge’s Final Cut workshop for films in post-production from Africa and the Arab world.

The director’s sophomore feature is a deeply personal story about her struggle to emerge from the long shadow cast by her mother, powerhouse producer and filmmaker Marianne Khoury, while also preparing to become a first-time mom.

It follows the 32-year-old filmmaker, who — obsessed with the idea of severing the umbilical cord that still connects her to her workhorse mother — moves out from her childhood home in downtown Cairo to live in a small house in the suburbs.

While overseeing its construction, she remembers her childhood and the Ethiopian nanny who raised her, setting in motion an emotional journey to wrestle with the lingering pain of her mother’s absence from her life growing up.

Shazli’s directorial debut,...

The Criterion Channel has unveiled its streaming lineup for August 2024, which features an eclectic mix of independent films showcasing the work of auteurs from around the world.

The boutique service will become the exclusive streaming home of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 comedy “Licorice Pizza,” and will celebrate the occasion by adding four more of his films to the channel: “The Master,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” and “Magnolia.” Anderson’s frequent collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman will additionally be celebrated on the streaming service as part of a larger retrospective. Many of the late actor’s most iconic roles, including “Capote” and “Synecdoche, New York,” will be included, along with his sole directorial outing “Jack Goes Boating.”

The channel will also highlight several other prominent filmmakers including Preston Sturges, who helped pioneer the modern rom-com through films like “The Lady Eve” and “The Palm Beach Story,” and prolific Egyptian auteur Youssef Chahine.

The Criterion Channel’s August lineup pays tribute to auteurs of all kinds: directors, actors, and photographers, fictional or otherwise. In a notable act of preservation and advocacy, they’ll stream 20 titles by the Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, here introduced by the great Richard Peña. More known (but fun all the same) is a five-title Paul Thomas Anderson series including the exclusive stream of Licorice Pizza, as well as a Philip Seymour Hoffman series that overlaps with Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love (a Criterion Edition this month), and The Master, plus 25th Hour, Love Liza, and his own directing effort Jack Goes Boating. Preston Sturges gets five movies, with Sullivan’s Travels arriving in October.

Theme-wise, a photographer series includes Rear Window, Peeping Tom, Blow-up, Close-Up, and Clouzot’s La prisonnière; “Vacation Noir” features The Lady from Shanghai, Brighton Rock, Kansas City Confidential, Purple Noon, and La piscine. Alongside the aforementioned PTA and Antonioni pictures,...

Terry Gilliam has been to Cannes with three of his own films since 1983, but one of his favorite memories of the festival takes him back to that very first time, at the 36th edition, as the co-writer and co-star of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Along with Graham Chapman and the film’s director Terry Jones, he’d emerged from the Carlton hotel’s iconic entrance, then bedecked with promotion for the upcoming Bond movie Octopussy, to encounter a camera crew. Jones started grabbing people at random, shouting, “Who Ees Monty Python???” in a ridiculous foreign accent, and got so carried away that, when they reached the hotel’s famous terrace, he accidentally did it to Gilliam too.

The crowd loved it, and the day only grew stranger. Out on the Carlton’s jetty, they gave an interview to British news channel ITN, with Jones hiding behind Graham...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSHard Truths.Mike Leigh’s forthcoming Hard Truths will reunite him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, star of Secrets and Lies (1996). It will be the British director’s first film set in the present day since Another Year (2010).Jia Zhangke has divulged some details of We Shall Be All, now in the early stages of post-production. In production off and on since 2001, the film will be his first feature since Ash Is Purest White (2018). “I travelled with actors and a cameraman to shoot, without a script, without any obvious story,” the director told Variety. “This is a work of fiction, but I have applied many documentary methods.”Robert Bresson’s rarely seen Four Nights of a Dreamer is being restored by MK2 Films, set for a spring release.

Ambiguous, Kafkaesque and with a deadpan wit, Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy’s debut feature explores a woman’s place in a man’s world

Egyptian film-maker Omar El Zohairy is a brilliant emerging talent with an impressive professional pedigree; he is a former assistant to Yousry Nasrallah (who himself started out as assistant to the celebrated Youssef Chahine) and has won festival prizes with this, his debut feature. It’s a comedy with a little of Woody Allen or Franz Kafka – though with not much of the famous Emily Dickinson quote about what hope is. It is also a social-surrealist parable about a woman’s place in a man’s world. Higher than the animals? Lower than the animals? El Zohairy conjures something elegant and mysterious with a deadpan wit, which coolly encases its compassion. He frames his shots with superb compositional flair – this film actually reminded me of another Egyptian film,...

Egyptian producer, director and mentor Marianne Khoury has been appointed artistic director of the El Gouna Film Festival in a clear sign that the prominent Arab event is aiming to make an ambitious comeback for its sixth edition following a one year hiatus.

The fest, launched in 2017 by Egyptian telecom billionaire Naguib Sawiris – whose brother Samih built the El Gouna resort in a swathe of Egypt’s desert near Hurghada, a tourist town 250 miles south of Cairo – was cancelled in 2022 after being held successfully for five years.

Khoury will replace Amir Ramses who stepped down as El Gouna’s artistic director at the end of its fifth edition before the event took a one year pause. Ramses subsequently took the reins as artistic director of the Cairo Film Festival, which is Egypt’s oldest and preeminent film event.

Though no reason was given at the time for El Gouna’s...

Egyptian director has made films including Cannes 2012 Competition title ‘After the Battle’.

Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah will receive the Golden Pyramid honorary award for lifetime achievement at the 45th edition of Cairo International Film Festival.

The award will be given ‘in appreciation of what Nasrallah has presented throughout his fabulous artistic career’, according to the festival.

Having started his career as an assistant to Youssef Chahine in the 1980s, Nasrallah went on to make his own features including 1999 Locarno title El Medina, and Cannes entries including 2004’s The Gate of Sun and 2012’s Competition entry After The Battle.

His most...

‘Paper Empire’ Sets Entire Third Season Shoot At Saudi Arabia’s Film AlUla

Cryptocurrency drama Paper Empire will film the entirety of its 10-episode third season at Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning shooting hub and location Film AlUla. Created and directed by Robert Gillings, the high-profile cast will feature Robert Davi, Denise Richards, Kelsey Grammar, Carole Alt, Helena Mattsson, Wesley Snipes, Anne Archer, Richard Grieco, Robert Knepper, Steve Guttenberg among a host of returning and guest stars. The action-drama series is produced by Robert Gillings Productions, Tadross Media Group and Inner Circle Films. “We are delighted the Paper Empire team will be basing their new season in AlUla, we’ve worked with the creative team to provide locations which underscore the glamour, opulence and world-class production value of the series,” said Film AlUla Director Charlene Deleon-Jones.

BBC Acquires Dark Irish Drama Series

The BBC and Australia’s Sbs have acquired Clean Sweep,...

With a Netflix subscription comes a large variety of original movies and television shows made just for the streaming service. Because of the new offerings every month, sometimes classic selections can be overlooked. There are, however, many classic movies on Netflix available for subscribers to stream.

The following movies tell epic tales. Some are sweeping wartime biographies, others are gritty horror or crime dramas, or even satires meant to make the audience think, while others are black-and-white monoliths on which many in modern filmmaking have been influenced and found their own cinematic footing. These films are visual expressions at a high level, showing off what human beings can do creatively and with storytelling. All are critically acclaimed, some with prestigious awards, and others appearing on the "greatest movies" lists put out by film institutes or historical groups.

Related: The Best Movies On Netflix

Animal House (1978)

Animal House might not have...

Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy, whose absurdist social satire “Feathers” won the Cannes Critics’ Week prize in 2021 and went on to make a major splash, is set to helm “Mammals,” an English-language drama that will be a reflection on Western capitalism and family ties.

El Zohairy’s sophomore film, which will feature still unspecified actors from different countries, is being co-written by the buzzed-about auteur with British Egyptian writer-director Mohamed Adeeb, who wrote the hit Egyptian TV series “Bimbo,” directed by Amr Salama.

“Mammals” takes its cue from events in Adeeb’s life which in turn inspired El Zohairy to draw inspiration from the life of his father, who died in 2016 in the United States, where he was an immigrant living under difficult conditions, he said. In the film, a young man visits his distant father in one of the world’s most lavish resorts. When he arrives there he discovers that,...

“This explosion in enthusiasm renews your hope in the future of cinema.”

A major landmark in Saudi Arabia’s cinema culture takes place today – the opening of the country’s first independent cinema since the reintroduction of cinemas to the country in 2018.

The Hayy Cinema, part of the Hayy Jameel arts complex in the Al Mohammadiyyah district in the north of Jeddah, hosts two screens: a 168-seat main room and a 30-seat community screening room, plus a multimedia library and educational exhibition space.

The venue will play films similar to those at independent cinemas around the globe: Saudi, Arab and African films,...

Egyptian superstar Yousra over the course of a four-decade career has starred in a multitude of Arabic film and TV milestones comprising classic movies such as Youssef Chahine’s “Alexandria: Again and Forever” and Marwan Hamed’s “The Yacoubian Building,” and hit Ramadan series “Public Opinion Case,” which was instrumental in changing Egypt’s rape victim legislation.

But while Yousra has appeared in several co-productions, she recently had the first-time experience of working on the Mbc series “Rose & Layla” with a non-Arabic writer-director duo: British screenwriter Cris Cole, creator of the BAFTA-nominated series “Mad Dogs,” and Adrian Shergold, who directed “Mad Dogs.” “Rose & Layla,” which is produced by Maged Mohsen and Safa Aburizik, will be distributed internationally by veteran Brit exec Stewart Till’s Till Entertainment.

The groundbreaking 10-episode show – which will be launching on Mbc’s Shahid streamer by year’s end – marks another first, pairing Yousra with popular...

Dubai-based distributor and producer Front Row Filmed Entertainment has acquired Middle East and North Africa (Mena) rights to British-Palestinian filmmaker Basil Khalil’s action-packed drama “A Gaza Weekend” ahead of its regional premiere at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival.

Front Row, which is a prominent distributor of indie films in Mena region, picked up “Gaza Weekend” from London-based sales and production outfit Protagonist Pictures after it premiered positively at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Made by British-Emirati producer Amina Dasmal and Robin C. Fox, who executive produced, “Gaza Weekend” is set in a world where Israel is sealed off after a deadly virus outbreak and Gaza has become the safest spot in the region. British journalist (Stephen Mangan) and his Israeli girlfriend (Mouna Hawa) find themselves stuck on the wrong side of the border, needing the help of two Palestinian street merchants who promise them a...

New works by Palestinian docmaker Amer Shomali (“The Wanted 18”), emerging Egyptian filmmaker Sara Shazli (“Back Home”) and first-time Jordanian director Amjad Al Rasheed are among the 16 projects selected for the 9th Cairo Film Connection, the Cairo Film Festival’s co-production platform.

The event features films from 10 countries, including five from the host nation, with 11 fiction and documentary features in development and five currently in post-production being presented to producers, distributors, sales agents and festival programmers.

This year’s edition received a record 135 submissions, according to incoming Cairo Film Connection manager Lynda Belkhiria, pointing toward a broader surge in production across North Africa and the Middle East. “There is a need, there is a demand,” she said. “There is something going on across the region.”

Many of the projects are female-led and examine the ongoing struggle of women to define themselves against the expectations of their families and societies. Still others...

Egypt, which is home to the Middle East and North Africa’s biggest film industry, will not participate in the Best International Film Oscar race this year.

According to Egyptian media reports, confirmed by Deadline, the committee of critics and cinema professionals responsible for selecting the country’s submission decided not to send a film for the lack of a credible candidate.

The four films on the final shortlist comprised Marwan Hamed’s Kira & El Gin, Hadi El-Baghoury’s Full Moon, Sherif Arafa’s The Crime and Magdy Ahmed Ali’s 2 Talaat Harb.

Two films generating potential submission buzz — Nadine Khan’s Abu Saddam and Omar El Zohairy’s Cannes 2021 Critics’ Week winner Feathers — could not be taken into consideration because they did not meet the 2022 theatrical release requirements.

The decision for Egypt to opt out of the race was made at the end of September, but the news has...

In Morocco, homosexuality is banned and just one in five citizens find gayness “acceptable,” at least according to a 2019 poll. An Elton John concert twelve years ago broke the law, but was personally approved by Morocco’s king. Still, Grindr thrives, and third-largest city, Tangier, has a decades-long tradition as a haven for LGBT+ culture in North Africa.

Morocco thus makes a fitting setting for British sophomore director Fyzal Boulifa’s challenging melodrama “The Damned Don’t Cry,” a loose remake of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Mamma Roma,” which was nominated for the Golden Lion sixty Venice Film Festivals ago. But selectors in this year’s Giornate Degli Autori sidebar program did not place Boulifa’s film out of sentimentality alone. “The Damned Don’t Cry” is excellent, asking tough questions about society and morality without easy answers or neat conclusions. Non-actors populate the cast, performing terrifically, in one of many nods...

Netflix is launching an incubator to help foster female screenwriters in Egypt.

The U.S. streaming giant has partnered with Sard, a dedicated hub for screenwriters in the Arab world on a writing program called Because She Created.

Its stated goal is training twenty women from outside Cairo and to “expose untapped talent to the creative tools and industry insight needed to advance their creative and professional development,” Netflix said in a statement.

The program is financed by the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity.

Sard was founded by award-winning writer Mariam Naoum in 2016 as a space for aspiring screenwriters to improve their writing skills and unleash their creative potential.

Naoum is a prominent Egyptian screenwriter and social activist whose credits include Kamla Abou Zekry’s Cairo-set ensemble film “One/Zero”; and the TV series “A Girl named Zat,” “Heat Wave” and “The Women’s Prison,” a scathing exploration of the Egyptian prison system,...

BBC Greenlights Drama On Football Sexual Abuse Scandal; Nick Rowland & Matt Greenhalgh Attached

The BBC has greenlit a factual drama telling the story of the former footballer whose revelations about the sexual abuse he suffered as a youth player sent shockwaves through the footballing world. Calm With Horses’ Nick Rowland is directing and Control’s Matt Greenhalgh is writing Floodlights, which will spotlight Andy Woodward, whose public retelling of the horrific trauma he experienced led to a national inquiry. The Last Kingdom’s Gerard Kearns will play Woodward and the show will also feature Jonas Armstrong (The Bay), Morven Christie (Lockwood & Co) and Steve Edge (Benidorm). “Since speaking out in 2016 I wanted to continue to encourage people to talk without fear, to make a change,” said Woodward. “Floodlights tells my story, which no child should ever have to go through. I hope this film helps to stop abuse in football...

Egyptian filmmaker Amir Ramses, who has tackled controversial social and political themes including pedophilia in works such as “Curfew” and the doc “Jews of Egypt,” has been appointed director of the Cairo Film Festival.

The news that Ramses will head Cairo, which is the grande dame of Arab film events, follows shortly after prominent producer Mohamed Hefzy stepped down as Cairo fest president earlier this month.

Hefzy was replaced as fest president by veteran Egyptian actor Hussein Fahmy, 81, a local megastar, who is taking over the event’s presidency for the second time after a first term between 1998 to 2001.

Ramses, who was previously artistic director of Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival between 2017 to 2021, is now expected to take on a broader role at Cairo extending beyond artistic director into a general manager position.

A graduate of Cairo’s Higher Institute of Cinema, Ramses cut his teeth as a film...

Egyptian filmmaker was previously artistic director of Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival.

Egyptian filmmaker Amir Ramses has been appointed director of the Cairo International Film (Ciff), as the event restructures its team following the departure of Mohamed Hefzy as president last week.

Ramses was appointed by incoming Ciff president Hussein Fahmy who returns to the role for a second time after a first term from 1998 to 2001.

Ramses was previously artistic director of the El Gouna Film Festival from 2017 to 2021.

A graduate of Cairo’s Higher Institute of Cinema in 2000, he cut his teeth as a filmmaker as an assistant to director Youssef Chahine.

Egyptian producer, director, writer and mentor Marianne Khoury is being honored with the Legion of Honor, France’s highest prize.

Khoury, who is the niece of late great Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, is a managing partner in prominent Cairo-based Misr International Films, which Chahine founded. She has directed several documentaries, most recently “Let’s Talk,” which premiered at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in 2019 and interweaves a treasure trove of archive material with cinematic conversations between four women from different generations in her family.

Besides having worked closely with Chahine, who was one of Arab cinema’s leading lights, Khoury –– who holds economic degrees from Cairo and Oxford Universities –– has shepherded some 30 Arab films and docs, many of which are centered around themes of identity, memory, marginalization and womanhood, and launched Zawya, which is Egypt’s first art house cinema circuit.

Having established close ties to France’s film community,...

In terms of international recognition, this week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced feature films eligible for consideration in the International Feature Film category for the 94th Academy Awards. Since the African continent first submitted a film for Oscar consideration in 1958, with Egyptian director Youssef Chahine’s “Cairo Station,” the number of African submissions for Best International Film Oscar consideration seems to be stabilizing at an average of around 10 annually. Eight films were submitted for the 2019 awards; 10 for 2020; and 12 for 2021, which marked a record. Ten submissions are in consideration for the upcoming 2022 ceremony.

The history of cinema on the African continent is expectedly complex and brief — unlike other artforms including music and literature, of which there are decades, if not centuries of rich history.

Due to restrictive colonialist structures and a Francophone/Anglophone divide, Africans weren’t always in a position to tell their own stories on film.

Eric Lagesse, the CEO/president of Paris-based arthouse distributor and world sales outfit Pyramide Films, received the Industry Tribute Award at Cairo Film Festival on Friday. Variety spoke with him about his relationship with Arab cinema, and the state of the independent film business in France.

How do you feel about receiving this tribute?

It’s great, but I have had a year to get used to it. Because of the pandemic, I didn’t receive it last year, as planned. Nothing major has changed in the meantime. I am still very fond of Arab and Egyptian films. We are now working with a new generation of films and filmmakers like “Amira” (pictured), which played in the Horizons Competition at the Venice Film Festival this year.

What is your connection to the Arab film world?

We have been collaborating with the Arab world since the beginning of Pyramide. The first...

We were a film couple. David Chute was writing film reviews for the Boston Phoenix when I met him in New York. He’d come down for a George Romero party, where we talked for hours. He had written two pieces for Film Comment, where I was the new Associate Editor. And even though I had landed my dream job, when he moved to Los Angeles to join Peter Rainer at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, he convinced me to ditch my Upper West Side rent-controlled apartment and move in with him in Koreatown. I had never been to California and had to learn how to drive. We were married in October 1983, and six years later, Nora arrived.

Sadly, we both said goodbye to David last week; he died at age 71 on November 8 of esophageal cancer. He had just moved back after eight years taking care of his father in Poland,...

We were a film couple. David Chute was writing film reviews for the Boston Phoenix when I met him in New York. He’d come down for a George Romero party, where we talked for hours. He had written two pieces for Film Comment, where I was the new Associate Editor. And even though I had landed my dream job, when he moved to Los Angeles to join Peter Rainer at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, he convinced me to ditch my Upper West Side rent-controlled apartment and move in with him in Koreatown. I had never been to California and had to learn how to drive. We were married in October 1983, and six years later, Nora arrived.

Sadly, we both said goodbye to David last week; he died at age 71 on November 8 of esophageal cancer. He had just moved back after eight years taking care of his father in Poland,...

David Chute, a longtime film critic and writer who tirelessly championed Hong Kong films in the U.S., died Nov. 8 in Los Angeles.

His daughter, Nora Chute, confirmed that he died of esophageal cancer.

Chute wrote for publications including the Boston Phoenix, Film Comment, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times and Variety, often advocating for genre films and international filmmakers to get the recognition they deserved.

Chute grew up in Maine with his father, Robert, a poet and biology professor at Bates College, his mother, Vicki, a novelist. He launched his career in the 70s as a film critic at the Kennebec Journal and The Maine Times, where he discovered Stephen King, who he also profiled for Take One. In 1979, King inscribed a copy of “The Shining” to David Chute, “the best film critic in America.”

In 1978, Chute joined the staff of The Boston Phoenix,...

IndieWire turns 25 this year. To mark the occasion, we’re running a series of essays about the future of everything we cover.

Quick: How many films can you find on Netflix from before 1980? Gems can be uncovered there — shout-out to Youssef Chahine’s 1958 Egyptian classic, “Cairo Station” — but the burden is on those cinephiles already interested enough to seek them out.

Lovers of film history aren’t born, they’re made. Discussions with other film fans, nights out at your university rep cinema, and serendipitous discoveries on Turner Classic Movies, certainly help. Many of us owe our parents for exposing us to classic film at an early age. Still, we’ve reached a point where movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, as well as concurrent world cinema titles, are more accessible than ever, but risk falling further into obscurity.

There was a time when you couldn’t see even towering classics,...

The series Youssef Chahine: Son of the Nile is showing on Mubi starting September 16, 2021 in most countries.Image from https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.itBologna, June 2019. I spotted an Arab name on the badge of the hotel's night porter. When I asked, he turned out to be one—an Egyptian. I mentioned to him that Youssef Chahine's films would be playing in Bologna for the next few days. His face lit up. A floodgate of emotions, about Egypt, his past, and cinema opened, temporarily drowned him in nostalgia, passion and regret. He shared stories of Chahine, of his beloved Alexandria. He even cursed the extra who had forgotten to remove his wristwatch during the battle scene of Salah Eddin (a film about the Crusade, from the Arabs' point of view). According to him, by doing so he had prevented the film from entering the Oscar competition.Very few directors can make that impact on their people,...

In all of Egyptian cinema, few movies have been made like Al Momia (1969) (also known as The Mummy and also known as The Night of the Counting Years), whether before or after. Shadi Abdel Salam’s epic about an Upper Egyptian clan who makes their living looting a Pharaonic tomb in a mountain they control remains the guiding post for many an Egyptian filmmaker in terms of what is possible within the industry. But the initial commercial failure of the film continues to raise questions over its role in the history of Egyptian film, particularly as little to no imitators followed in its wake: was The Mummy a landmark of mid-century Egyptian filmmaking, or was it a one-off endeavor the likes of which we may never see again? Youssef Rakha’s mesmerizing book Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy, takes on the gargantuan...

The 60th edition marks film critic Charles Tesson’s last year at the helm.

Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy’s surreal tragi-comedy Feathers has scooped the €15,000 grand prize at the 60th edition of Cannes’ Critics’ Week.

It is the debut feature of El Zohairy who cut his teeth working as an assistant director to Youssef Chahine and Yousry Nasrallah.

The story revolves around a family liberated from the control of a tyrannical patriarch after he is turned into a chicken during a magic show. Juliette Lepoutre and Pierre Menahem at France’s Still Moving lead produced in co-production with Cairo-based Film Clinic,...

The project is Omar El Zohairy’s feature directing debut.

Screen can exclusively reveal the first trailer for Omar El Zohairy’s Feathers, which plays in the Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (July 6-17).

Feathers follows an Egyptian wife and mother whose life is reinvented when a magician accidentally turns her authoritarian husband into a chicken.

The project is El Zohairy’s feature directing debut after working as an assistant director for the likes of Youssef Chahine and Yousry Nasrallah, and was awarded the Baumi Development Award at Marrakech’s 2020 Atlas Workshops with further development at TorinoFilmLab and Cannes Cinefondation.

Irish documentarian Mark Cousins is in a jovial mood. He has two films in Cannes and the first one debuted on opening day, “The Story of Film: A New Generation.” It’s a wide-ranging update to his 15-hour film-school staple “The Story of Film: An Odyssey” (the new one is a slimmer two hours and 20 minutes). Cannes director Thierry Fremaux felt that Cousins’ new film could provide a welcome transition for moviegoers as the festival returned after two years. Indeed, reviews are raves and sales agent Dogwoof is fielding offers.

“Lockdown happened,” said Cousins on Zoom from his home office in Edinburgh just before the festival. “A lot of us had more thinking time and creative time. So I made three films.” His portrait of radical British producer, “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas,” will play in Cannes Classics. The third is a personal documentary based on his 2018 history of the visual world,...

Irish documentarian Mark Cousins is in a jovial mood. He has two films in Cannes and the first one debuted on opening day, “The Story of Film: A New Generation.” It’s a wide-ranging update to his 15-hour film-school staple “The Story of Film: An Odyssey” (the new one is a slimmer two hours and 20 minutes). Cannes director Thierry Fremaux felt that Cousins’ new film could provide a welcome transition for moviegoers as the festival returned after two years. Indeed, reviews are raves and sales agent Dogwoof is fielding offers.

“Lockdown happened,” said Cousins on Zoom from his home office in Edinburgh just before the festival. “A lot of us had more thinking time and creative time. So I made three films.” His portrait of radical British producer, “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas,” will play in Cannes Classics. The third is a personal documentary based on his 2018 history of the visual world,...

After Blue (Paradis sale)The lineup for the 2021 festival has been revealed, including new films by Bertrand Mandico, Axelle Ropert, Abel Ferrara and others, alongside retrospectives and tributes, and much more.Piazza GRANDEBeckett (Ferdinando Cito Filomarino)Free Guy (Shawn Levy)Heat (Michael Mann)Hinterland (Stefan Ruzowitzky)Ida Red (John Swab)Monte Verità (Stefan Jäger)National Lampoon's Animal House (John Landis)Respect (Liesl Tommy)Rose (Aurélie Saada)Sinkhole (Kim Ji-hoon)The Alleys (Bassel Ghandour)The Terminator (James Cameron)Vortex (Gaspar Noé)Yaya e Lennie — The Walking Liberty (Alessandro Rak)Tomorrow My Love (Gitanjali Rao)Lynx (Laurent Geslin)Zeros and OnesCONCORSO INTERNAZIONALEAfter Blue (Paradis sale) (Bertrand Mandico)Al Naher (The River) (Ghassan Salhab)Espíritu sagrado (The Sacred Spirit) (Chema García Ibarra)Gerda (Natalya Kudryashova)I giganti (The Giants) (Bonifacio Angius)Jiao ma teng hui (A New Old Play) (Jiongjiong Qiu)Juju StoriesLa Place d'une autre (Secret Name) (Aurélia Georges)Leynilögga (Cop Secret...

Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Namir Abdel Messeeh has teamed with Paris-based production outfit Les Films d’Ici for his next feature, the autobiographical hybrid-doc “Life After Siham.”

Building on themes he developed in his award-winning 2011 doc “The Virgin, the Copts and Me,” a self-reflexive exploration of family and identity that played in Cannes, Berlin and Copenhagen, among others, the filmmaker will once again take center stage in this follow-up, which will find the director grieving his mother’s passing and dealing with a creative impasse as he leads a writing workshop in Egypt.

Currently in pre-production and presented as part of the Visions du Réel project pitch session, the film will follow two parallel tracks, mixing family footage the director shot before and after his mother’s passing against the fictional backdrop of a creative retreat set at the late Egyptian director Youssef Chahine’s one-time residence.

With the spirits of Messeeh’s mother,...

Other winners included Russian drama ‘Conference’ and Egyptian documentary ‘Lift Like A Girl’.

Ben Sharrock’s UK drama Limbo was awarded three top prizes at the Cairo International Film Festival (Ciff) on Thursday, including the Golden Pyramid for best film.

The asylum seeker drama, which received a Cannes 2020 label and world premiered at Toronto, also won the Henry Barakat award for best artistic contribution and the Fipresci critics award. It follows a best film win at the Macao international film festival in China earlier this week.

The 47th edition of the festival, which took place as a physical event in the Egyptian capital,...

Nelson Makengo’s “Rising Up at Night” from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Omar El Zohairy’s “Feathers of a Father” from Egypt won the prizes for films in post-production in Marrakech Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops, which is for projects from Africa and the Arab world.

Documentary feature “Rising Up at Night,” produced by Rosa Spaliviero and Dada Kahindo, follows a community in Kinshasa as it attempts to restore its electricity supply. It is set against the backdrop of a society “where violence, extreme poverty and corruption are king,” according to the director, whose “Up at Night” won the short documentary award at IDFA last year. “Rising Up at Night” won the Prix Brouillon d’un Rêve, and was selected by IDFAcademy, Berlinale Talents and Durban Film Mart.

“Feathers of a Father,” produced by Juliette Lepoutre and Pierre Menahem, charts the liberation of an Egyptian family after...

Bookmark this page for all the latest international feature submissions.

Submissions for the best international feature film award at the 2021 Academy Awards have started to come in, and Screen is keeping a running list of each film below.

Scroll down for the full list

The 93rd Academy Awards is set to take place on April 25, 2021. It was originally set to be held on February 28, before both the ceremony and eligibility period were postponed for two months due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Submitted films must have been released in their respective countries between the expanded dates of October 1, 2019, and December 31, 2020. (Last year it was October-September.

Bookmark this page for all the latest international feature submissions.

Submissions for the best international feature film award at the 2021 Academy Awards have started to come in, and Screen is keeping a running list of each film below.

Scroll down for the full list

The 93rd Academy Awards is set to take place on April 25, 2021. It was originally set to be held on February 28, before both the ceremony and eligibility period were postponed for two months due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Submitted films must have been released in their respective countries between the expanded dates of October 1, 2019, and December 31, 2020. (Last year it was October-September.

After dipping its toes in production in the Middle East, Netflix on Thursday launched its most ambitious Arabic show to date with supernatural drama “Paranormal,” directed by young Egyptian helmer Amr Salama (“Sheikh Jackson”).

The six-episode series out of Egypt, which is set in the 1960s, is based on bestselling Arabic horror books by late Egyptian author Ahmed Khaled Tawfik. It depicts the adventures of lead character Dr. Refaat Ismail, a hematologist whose scientific convictions fall apart when he is faced with paranormal occurrences. Each episode is a standalone story centered around one of the “Paranormal” tomes.

Salama served as showrunner and producer on “Paranormal” in tandem with prominent Egyptian indie producer Mohammed Hefzy, whose Film Clinic shingle is known internationally for churning out a stream of edgy titles such as “Microphone,” “Sheikh Jackson” and “Yomeddine.” Hefzy also heads up the Cairo Film Festival.

“Paranormal” marks a starting point for...

16 regional and international features are competing for the festival’s $50,000 Golden Star award.

Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival kicked off its fourth edition against the Covid-19 odds over the weekend, feting French actor Gérard Depardieu and UK director Peter Webber with its special Golden Star Career Achievement Award at the opening ceremony.

Taking to the stage, Depardieu praised the festival for pulling off such a large-scale event and professed his admiration for late Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine.

A host of film and TV stars from Egypt as well as a smattering of international guests walked the red carpet at the glitzy opening event,...

Ghost Tropic and A Certain Kind of Silence were among the European movies awarded during the 41st edition of the Ciff, as the event attained Oscar-qualifying status. Before the 41st Cairo International Film Festival (Ciff) announced its award winners, the event received a distinction from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences: Oscar-qualifying film-festival status. From now on, any short film that wins Cairo’s Cinema of Tomorrow competition will be eligible for consideration in two Oscar categories: Animated and Live-action Short Film. This year, the opportunity was given to Ambience by Wisam Al Jafari (Palestine), which scooped the Youssef Chahine Award for Best Short Film. The International Competition Jury, led by Stephen Gaghan, decided to give the top recognition, the Golden Pyramid Award for Best Film, to I Am No Longer Here by Fernando Frias (Mexico/USA), which revolves around a 17-year-old boy who has to leave his native Mexico.

“I’m No Longer Here,” a drama about immigration and identity by young Mexican director Fernando Frias, was the big winner at the Cairo Film Festival, which wrapped Friday.

“I’m No Longer Here,” which turns on a 17-year-old urban tribe leader forced by conflict with a cartel to leave Mexico for Queens, scooped Cairo’s top prize, the Golden Pyramid, for best film. It also took acting honors for newcomer Juan Daniel Garcia Trevino, who plays Ulises Sampiero, leader of Los Terkos, who are known for their dance moves and extravagant hairstyles. In Queens, Ulises winds up either sparking hostility from other immigrants or being treated as a fashion curiosity. The pic, which launched internationally in Cairo, is generating buzz after recently scoring the top prize at the Morelia fest in Mexico.

The Cairo jury, headed by Oscar-winning U.S. writer-director Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”), awarded the Silver Pyramid to “Ghost Tropic” by Belgian helmer Bas Devos,...

“Let’s Talk,” which interweaves a treasure trove of archive material with cinematic conversations between four women from different generations in the family of late great Egyptian master Youssef Chahine, is a quintessentially personal project for director Marianne Khoury.

Chahine, who was Arab cinema’s leading light for over half a century, was her uncle. It’s a family in which life and movies are closely intertwined.

Which is why Khoury in making this doc – that is world premiering in competition at Idfa and segueing rapidly to a plum competition slot at the Cairo Film Festival – insisted that she produce it herself through Misr International Films, the storied Cairo-based production company that her family has been running for over half a century.

Khoury, who besides being a director is also a producer and a writer, spent years gathering material for this unique project being sold internationally by France’s Pyramide Films.

The Cairo Film Festival, which is the grand dame of the Arab world’s cinema shindigs, looks set for a watershed edition, its second headed by producer Mohamed Hefzy whose reboot effort is coming into full swing.

Besides the Middle East launch of Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” which is Cairo’s opener, Hefzy and his team have secured roughly 25 international bows and several world premieres. They’ve lured top talents such as Oscar-winning U.S. writer/director Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”) who is presiding over the main jury, as well as Terry Gilliam and Guillermo Arriaga.

Industry execs making the trek include Agc Studios topper Stuart Ford, AMC Networks’ VP of productions Kristin Jones, and Netflix director of international originals Ahmed Sharkawi, just as TV becomes an integral part of the fest’s market component.

Launched in 1976, amid the Egyptian film industry’s golden age, the Cairo fest soon soared...

Festival brass say 64% of competition titles directed by women, representing record 47% of total programme.

The International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (Idfa) has unveiled the line-up for its 32nd edition, which is set to take place from Nov 20-Dec 1.

At present, 64% of the festival’s competition titles are directed by women, representing 47% of the total programme - the highest in the festival’s history.

Idfa will open with the world premiere of Mehrdad Oskouei’s Sunless Shadows, about five young Iranian women who are all accomplices in the murder of their abusive husbands, fathers, or brothers-in-law.

The flagship 12-strong Best Feature-Length Documentary competition line-up includes I Walk,...