It was a great pity that the children were not able to attend an event mainly geared to their interests, the Cairo film festival for children. Last Thursday saw the close of the 18th round of the festival amid repeated criticism that it was being held in the thick of the scholastic year; the few children who made it to the Cairo Opera House where the festival was held were elated by what they encountered.
The festival, which lasted for a week and witnessed the participation of 42 countries, presented short and long films, as well as animation and TV productions.
Little boys
Japan participated with Boy Meets Ghost in which the naughty boy Ichiro Hanada who lives in a peaceful seaside village is hit by a truck, following which he begins seeing ghosts. There is the ghost of his old neighbour, one of a schoolgirl, and many others. But what makes him really furious is the ghost of a man who insists he is the boy’s real father. It leads to the unfolding of the secret story of the Hanada family, and ends in cheerful laughs.
The French film You White People dealt with homeless children. Eight-year-old Eria from a remote village in Uganda lives with a streetwise friend in a boarding school where they learn the lessons of life on their own.
As for the Egyptian Little Birds, it tells the story of two little village boys one of whom goes to school while the other helps his father in the field. They get acquainted as the school boy teaches his friend to read and write and the latter teaches him to make statues out of mud.
Strange planet
Animation and TV productions, however, stole the show. Egypt participated with 20 films and Latvia with 13. In the Egyptian Zika on the Planet of Wonders the small boy Zika lands on a strange planet where he gets a severe beating and finds out that the planet’s inhabitants are plotting against Planet Earth. Diary of a Nubian Child is a short film about Nubia seen through a child’s eyes. And film Assfour and Garadah depicts the good man Assfour, literally bird, who is married to the greedy Garadah or locust who forces her husband to work as a fortune teller. He predicts that the sultana will give birth to a boy and a girl and, by a stroke of luck his prediction comes true. The sultan then asks him to solve the mystery of the lost ring, but matters quickly get out of hand.
Among the many productions which gained acclaim was Latvia’s Smile my Friend, Italy’s The House that Plays Music, South Korea’s Sheep in the Island, Yemen’s Ahmed’s Back Home, the UK’s The Secret Show and Egypt’s Salem and the Golden Fish, A Hero from Sinai, and A Bee’s World.
Disillusioned
The festival honoured famous actors and actresses who had acted as children, including Laila Elwi, Mamdouh Abdel-Alim, Ula Ramy, and the director Nader Galal.
And on the sideline, there were workshops to teach the children crafts such as cutting and pasting, sculpturing, and the making of puppets and marionettes. However, the corner which was set up in previous years to exhibit the work of handicapped children and the NGOs which help them was conspicuously missing this year. When Watani asked the festival officials for the reason, the answer was that, due to the usually poor publicity and attendance, the participants were disillusioned and declined to participate this year.
School trips
Overall the festival was very well prepared, and its setting eminently appealing and attractive to children. But where were the children? Nagat Farouk, supervisor of the Cultural Development Fund’s creativity centre said the date of the festival could not be changed because it was convenient for all the participants on the international level. To offset the inconvenience for children, Hamed Hammad, director of the festival’s media centre said, schools were invited to take the children on trips to visit the festivals. If delayed till the school summer holidays, he said, the festival would still miss the presence of children since families then usually left Cairo for the beaches.