Cinema
Berlin Film Festival offers an exciting selection from across the globe
08 Feb 2013
BERLIN — The 63rd Berlin International Film Festival boasts a promising line-up packed with art-house blockbusters, debut features and copious retrospectives. But as in recent editions of the festival, the main selection could...
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Hong Kong’s ‘Grandmaster’ takes Berlin Film Fest by storm
08 Feb 2013
BERLIN - It took iconic Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai 10 years to bring his personal adaptation of the IP biography to screen, changing and adding more layers to the well-known story of the Bruce Lee mentor and expanding his impressive...
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The pick: Memories of a nuclear holocaust
08 Feb 2013
In a moment of questionable parenting, when I was five my father gave me animated adaptations of “Animal Farm” (the 1954 CIA-funded version) and “When the When Wind Blows." The former scared the hell out of me, and...
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This week in 1919: The birth of Egypt’s Hitchcock
07 Feb 2013
One of Egypt’s pioneering filmmakers, Kamal El Sheikh, was born on 5 February 94 years ago.
Sheikh is known as the “Egyptian Hitchcock,” after British film director Alfred Hitchcock, because of the similarities between...
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The pick: 'Logical Revolts' challenges conventional narratives of film and history
01 Feb 2013
The crisp, experimental, semi-fictional documentary, “Logical Revolts,” was shot in late 2011 and early 2012 in downtown Cairo, Port Said and Sinai. It starts with Arthur Rimbaud’s caustic poem “Democracy” and...
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The pick: Patricio Guzman's 'Nostalgia for the Light'
12 Jan 2013
Due to its exceptionally clear skies, the Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the best places in the world from which to observe the stars. Several giant telescopes are placed there, through which astronomers watch the birth and death of...
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In Search of 'Oil and Sand' recreates an old royal home movie
09 Jan 2013
On a warm summer evening in 1952, Cairo’s aristocracy gathered for a soiree at a palace belonging to King Farouk’s sister, Princess Faiza, and her husband, Bulent Raouf. The newly wedded couple was well known both in Egypt and...
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Independent filmmaking ‘coming forth by day’
01 Jan 2013
At some point during the shooting of “Ein Shams” in 2008, Ibrahim El Batout had a camera rigged on a moving car. Without a shooting permit, he was recording tracking shots of Cairo’s streets, to be used as a backdrop for...
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Court drops indecency cases against actress
27 Dec 2012
The Qasr al-Nil Misdemeanor Court dismissed two lawsuits filed by 45 people against actress Elham Shaheen for "spreading indecency" through her movies.
The complainants argued that Shaheen’s works contained many indecent...
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Egyptian film awarded at Wahran Film Festival
24 Dec 2012
Hala Lotfy's "Coming Forth by Day" received the Golden Wahr Award for the best feature film at the 6th Wahran Arab Film Festival, held at the Algerian city of Wahran.
Lotfy's debut feature-length film, which had its...
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