Discoveries from Egypt World Cinema

Three women of different age groups share their fears with each other and the world.

As living in the family home becomes increasingly heavy, I search for refuge in my family archive but discover that memories are even heavier.

“Baba” spent 30 years of his life working in Saudi Arabia while his daughters grew up in Cairo. Much of their relationship was created and preserved through videos exchanged over the years. When they are reunited, none of the family members completely manage to abandon this form of communication, as if trapped in the logic of exile.

Short documentary by Mohamed Shalaby

The documentary is about the life of Egyptian composer "Baligh Hamdi", showing both personal and musical sides, and the major artistic influence he left through dozens of songs, starting with Umm Kulthum and ending with his compositions for young singers, to approach his career in chronological sequence in which he captured the Arab hearts for more than fifty years

A film about social pressure that women over 30 go through when they don’t get married. The director who is 35 and single woman conducts interviews in a car journey of almost 30 minutes with women who are in their mid 30’s and didn’t get married representing different social opinions.

This film examines the Egyptian rural craft of making a sieve called ghurbal (from the Arabic ghurbal meaning “to winnow” which is used to both “winnow” babies on their seventh day of life and to winnow grains for making ceremonial dishes, particularly kouskousi. Embedded in this material culture artifact are layered meanings of creative regeneration of the cosmic and human worlds. We visually follow the material process from tree log cutting to making the tara (ghurbal frame), to ghurbal crafting, through the voice and image of two key persons: Na’ima, the craftswoman and owner of the frame shop, and Hoksha, the rural ghurbal craftsman. The ethnographer/filmmaker engages them to speak and we are drawn into their lives by their stories as we view self-confident mastery of their craft. While Hoksha relates how he has kept this child from his father, we see his son next to him making a modern flour sieve, having never learned the family tradition.

"Ghosts of Lost Futures" is a program of video works by 10 artists commissioned by the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection. Each artist was given access to the same cache of footage from the WFAA Newsfilm Collection shot in Dallas, Texas in the year 1970. The program was intended to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the archive, but due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, the program was not completed until the Spring of 2021. The artists were given complete freedom in how they re-interpreted the footage and its historical context. The resulting works are profound meditations on mourning, melancholy, disaster, and various reinterpretations of the events of 2020 and 2021 through images of Dallas' past. "The Void Remembers" is Marwa Benhalim's sumbission.

A philosophical field trip from Cairo, along the Nile and into the desert in search for what light means as a religious concept in post-revolutionary Egypt.

A transformative journey expressing the process of navigating emotions mirrored in the forming and reshaping of white desert clusters.

The final Mish Mish cartoon. Mixture of live action and animation. Mish Mish Effendi and his friend Fayyumi are seated at a restaurant and stuffing themselves, but since they don't have any money they leave without paying. Nightmares haunt their sleep that night. They are awoken the next morning by a loud knocking on their door: their creditors have come to collect.

A comic tale created by the late artist Hussein Al-Imam in order to pay tribute to the stars of the Egyptian cinema in its golden ages, where the main story of the film is based on the combination of scenes starring 21 stars of black and white stars, with other scenes written by the Imam and his heroine, to be the final product rediscovery Old stars in a new context.

The short film Al Dhareeh (1977) by Eltayeb Mahdi, founding member of the Sudanese Film Group, tells the story of a man who claims to be able to heal people.

The crazy incident of the episode revolves around Ashraf Abdel Baqi, who abducts Abla Kamel and holds her in a position and follows interesting events and comedies.

Shefan falls in love with Hanan's sister Jihan and works with her in the field of advertising. He wants to marry her even though she does not share the same feeling. Saffan encounters the presence of an old friend, a fugitive from the police, who helps him to disguise himself as hiding from the police chase and following events in the framework of satirical comedy.

Theatrical comedy review Manoor Ya Pasha starring Mohammed Najem Omar Hariri Samah Anwar Inas Makki Zia Al Mirghani

Mohamed Reda & Salama Elias & Dalal Abdelaziz & Abdelhafid Altawawy & Nadia Fahmy & George Sidham

Mohamed Reda & Hassan Al-Roubi & Ahmed Ammar & Amal Diab & Mohamed Tantawi & Rashad Othman & Laila Sabounji

This documentary is a set of interviews with women running for Egypt's Parliament in November of 1995. After a review of recent political history (from 1920 to the institution of women's suffrage in 1956, the election of two women to Parliament in 1957, the increase to 35 female MPs in 1984, and the fall to 10 in 1990), about 20 candidates talk to the camera: incumbents and newcomers; women from the ruling NDP party, from minor parties and independents. This is retail politics: meeting voters in small groups, holding store-front rallies. The candidates have feminist views, and they also champion clean water, better jobs, rebuilding housing after an earthquake, and fair, honest elections.