The management of the Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts was forced to withdraw the official poster for the next session, a few hours following its launch, due to the discovery that it had been stolen from a design by a Turkish artist, without mentioning that.
While the festival’s president, Issam Zakaria, justified in statements to “Sky News Arabia” what happened that it was not intended and that the artist who designed The poster It had good previous works but this time it fell from it.
On Saturday evening, the Ismailia Festival administration released a poster for its 24th session, which is chaired by film critic Essam Zakaria, and is scheduled to be held from 14 to 20 March in Ismailia Governorate.
The festival management said that the poster was designed by the artist Hadeer Al-Sajai, who explained that his idea came from the inspiration of the documentaries shown by the festival, and the relationship between cinema and the private audience, while its colors were appropriate to the spirit of that session..
However, a controversy soon arose on social media, especially among critics and those interested in cinema, following discovering what they described as the scandal of stealing the poster from a work of art by a Turkish artist entitled “woman at full moonIt dates back to 2016, and they demanded that the poster be withdrawn and the incident investigated, and that this harms Egypt’s reputation internally and externally..
For his part, the head of the Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts, Essam Zakaria, said that the festival management decided to withdraw the poster as soon as the controversy over it erupted, and another poster will be presented..
And he continued in statements to “Sky News Arabia” that the issue is not as it is being raised. The whole story is that the artist, who designed the poster and is an employee of the National Cinema Center, bought this design earlier from the Internet, and it was inadvertently lost that it belonged to a Turkish artist, so she used it in the festival’s poster..
And he added that this artist did not receive money for the design because she is an employee of the National Film Center that sponsors the festival, and she presented a design among others who presented other designs and the design was chosen, but following the controversy it was withdrawn..
He stressed that the festival did not attack the rights of the Turkish artist, because only the poster was announced in a press release and placed on the festival’s Facebook page, but it was not officially printed, and it was withdrawn, and therefore no one has the right to sue the festival for intellectual property rights..
And regarding whether the poster designer had been investigated, Zakaria said that these are internal matters, and this designer has many good previous works, but this time she fell from it because it seems that he inadvertently fell from it because the design belonged to someone else, because she is a graphic designer and buys many designs from within to forget.
It should be noted that this incident brought to mind another scandal that occurred months ago, when it was discovered that a graphic designer named Ghada Wali stole paintings belonging to the Russian artist Georgy Korasov, and used them as designed to decorate the walls of a metro station in Cairo, and she was paid millions of pounds for that, which forced her to Authorities to remove designs from the metro station and open an investigation into the incident.
