Cairo Film Festival Charts New Path With Classic Film Restoration

variety.com:

Ben Croll 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.