Chinese entries enthrall at Cairo film festival

CAIRO－The small theater of the Cairo Opera House seemed packed as the audience watched some of the 22 entries contesting the international short film competition in the 43rd edition of the Cairo International Film Festival.

The program started with the world premiere of Chinese entry, Poem for a Distant Village.

Directed by Liu Bing, the 30-minute fictional tale tells the story of a producer who has to cancel a film project due to the COVID-19 outbreak and return to his native village with the director and cinematographer. Village life amid the crisis inspires them to make a different film about childhood and death.

"It talks about a very important period we all have gone through, which is the COVID-19 lockdown," says Sami Creta, a program manager at Alexandria's Jesuit Cultural Center.

He highlights the importance of the participation of films "from an ancient culture like China" in the CIFF.

Among the films screened in the same program was Egyptian short film by Youhanna Nagy, titled It's Nothing Nagy, Just Hang up! The filmmaker expressed his admiration of the Chinese short film.

Alongside the inspiring storyline, Nagy says he admired the Chinese film's cinematography, as well as the sound effects that show "the Chinese director's awareness that the sound represents half the quality of the film".

In a movie theater in downtown Cairo, a young Egyptian woman could be seen relaxing while watching A Chat, a Chinese feature film also being screened during the festival.

"The film has put me in a peaceful mood. Its pace is perfect and the faces of the Chinese actresses and their costumes have made me feel so comfortable,"Eman el-Badry, a filmmaking student, says after watching the film.

Written and directed by Wang Xide and starring Ying Ze and Mu Ruini, the film was screened under the international panorama section of CIFF 43, outside the official competitions, among 15 films from different countries, including Lebanon, Germany, France, Sweden and Spain.

A Chat is a story about three generations of women in a southern Chinese family, including Gu Qing, a quiet tailor in her 30s who lives in a small town on her own. Her life is dull, until one day her niece Sun Yue comes from afar to learn sewing from her.

"I love China and when the Chinese do something, they make it excellent," the Egyptian student says.

The 43rd CIFF screened over 100 films from more than 60 countries, and has four main competitions, including the international competition for feature fiction and documentary films, and the international short film competition.

Veteran Egyptian movie star Hussein Fahmy, who was CIFF president for four years, hailed the Chinese cinema industry and says he has twice visited the Shanghai International Film Festival and established close cooperative ties between the CIFF and the SIFF.

"The Chinese films are good and the cinema industry in China, as I saw at the studios I visited there, is very advanced," says the renowned Egyptian actor.

For his part, CIFF President Mohamed Hefzy says the festival pays great attention to the participation of Chinese films, noting that the Chinese cinema industry now competes with Hollywood in terms of box-office revenues.

The 43rd CIFF kicked off on Nov 26 and concluded on Sunday.

Xinhua