Yes, we are overwhelmed with happiness because a not insignificant number of our young filmmakers are present in most of the international festivals’ competitions and events, and we are one week away from the opening of the Venice International Film Festival, whose management thanks actually for the policy of wide open doors for Arab films in the past ten years until today.
Yes, there are films from Lebanon (especially the tape: “Iron Copper Batteries”, directed by Wissam Sharaf), Syria, Iraq and Egypt, ready to compete for different prizes, as is the case with the next edition of the Berlin, Toronto, or London festivals, and all of them are always tapes From the Arab countries added to the ones that received and crowned the Cannes Festival in its many sessions.
What does all this mean? We will say it directly and without diplomacy: Today’s Arab filmmakers are more close and confident to international festivals. We lived and glorified great directors of our own, but they rarely caught the attention of the festivals administrations. Yes, Salah Abu Seif, Barakat, Atef Salem arrived, all the way to Youssef Chahine, but none of them won an award for his film from an international cinema platform, even Chahine when he won the Palm The gold was not obtained for his film, but was a tribute to his march on the fiftieth anniversary of the festival.
The question remains: why did the world love the films of our young directors more than the great pioneers of Arab cinema, who left huge masterpieces? These days, our directors win many prizes from festivals around the world, and sometimes they receive invitations to be judges on more than one international forum. As for the great veterans, they are honored among us and not among those interested in cinema abroad. Was it the themes at the time when these local stories were opened and brought to the big screen, and when the lone Arab was awarded a Palme d’Or for his film: “The Chronicles of the Years of Ember” by Algerian Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina, the subject was very local.
So where is the bottom line?
Cinema has many languages that it expresses, but one is the one in which it is adopted: innovation. The talented of our youth are more qualified for this task, for many reasons, the first of which is the cinema of the age, which is looking for a deep and serious expression of new ideas that mean humanity with all its ramifications, and it is a space that perhaps our cinema pioneers did not fill, while the way to it was known to the youth of our cinema with study and follow-up.
