Organised by NGO Independent Shabab Foundation (ISF) with support from numerous agencies, the festival is the brainchild of Egyptian screenwriter and actor Sayed Fouad – currently serving as its president – and Egyptian actress and film director Azza El Hosseiny.
The host city Luxor, which sits on the eastern bank of the River Nile, has a captivating history dating back 4,000 years ago. The opening ceremony will be held at the Luxor Temple – one of Egypt’s top-rated tourist attractions – which boasts some of the most remarkable colossal statues, under the theme ‘All Colours of Africa’.
Bringing Egypt closer to the rest of Africa
According to El Hosseiny, the idea for the festival was born in 2010, out of the desire and need to get Egypt closer to the African continent. “The need for the festival became even more apparent during the many political changes [in Egypt] in 2011, and the first edition was eventually launched in 2012,” she tells The Africa Report.
El Hosseiny says the choice of the festival was not an accident, adding that she and her co-founder wanted to create a decentralisation of art. Citing a multitude of film, music, theater festivals, and many other major events that Cairo has been jampacked with, she says the whole of Upper Egypt was in dire need of an important cultural event. Luxor is a city of huge diversity, one of the reasons the festival attracts people from all over the world.
“It stands at the crossroads of history, cultures and civilisations; it speaks through its countless historical monuments, rich agriculture, and the beauty of nature. What was missing is cinematic activity,” she says.
The Luxor festival features multiple segments, including four competitive ones;
- Feature film
- Short film
- African diaspora
- Egyptian student film competitions – all narrative, documentary and animated films which do not exceed 30 minutes.
This year’s competitive segments will screen 44 films, topped with titles in the ‘out of competition’ selections.
Mali’s cinema
Each year, the Luxor festival sheds light on one African country, with past editions featuring Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda, Morocco, and Senegal as countries of honour. El Hosseiny says though this year’s choice, Mali, does not have a large cinematic industry, it has been producing some of the biggest names in African cinema over the past years.
She makes reference to Souleymane Cissé, regarded as one of the first generation of African filmmakers and the recipient of the Carrosse d’Or (the Golden Coach) award at the 2023 Cannes film festival, and Malian actress and director Fatoumata Coulibaly who sat on Luxor festival’s short films jury in 2022.
“We will honour Mali’s cinema through a special film programme and panels featuring its representatives,” El Hosseiny says.
This year’s festival will bear the name of Khairy Beshara, the Egyptian multi-award-winning director credited with pioneering Egyptian neo-realism. El Hosseiny says a programme dedicated to him will include talks and screening of his films, in addition to the presentation of a new book about him by Egyptian film critic Essam Zakaria.
It is this cultural wealth that we celebrate during this festival.
The festival will also pay special tribute to the late Senegalese director and ethnologist Safi Faye, the first woman from sub-Saharan Africa to have a feature film commercially distributed.
“As some critics note, she was the first African woman to dare to make a film and so, honouring her is important to us,” El Hosseiny says, adding the festival will publish a book about her, written in French by Najib Sanya and Thierno Ibrahima Dia, who will also lead the main conference about Faye.
Honouring the legends
The Luxor festival’s connection with Senegal has always been strong. In 2023, the festival celebrated the birth centenary of Ousmane Sembène, the late Senegalese director popularly referred to as the father of African cinema, and exhibited Senegalese films.
In the past, it also celebrated some of the renowned names in African cinema, including Mauritanian-born Malian filmmaker Abdelrahamane Sissako, who directed Timbuktu.
Timbuktu (2014), a film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, was also nominated for a Palme d’Or at the 2014 Cannes film festival, where it won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the François Chalais Prize.
Also included in the tribute was Flora Gomes of Guinea Bissau, Ahmed Rachedi of Algeria, Doura Bouchoucha of Tunisia and Fanta Regina Nacro of Burkina Faso.
“[Luxor festival] is a melting pot of all African cinematic voices,” El Hosseiny says. “We are always trying to make a selection of nationals from north, south, west, east and central Africa. This is equally obvious in jury panels.”
The art of documentaries and shorts
The festival will hold numerous workshops, seminars and other events, with a focus on documentary filmmaking which, according to El Hosseiny, has become especially important in recent years.
“Documentary films attest to the realities, unveil many truths and transmit them onto screens. I am looking forward to a seminar that will tackle the subject of the creative documentary film to be held within the festival’s activities.”
On the series of workshops dedicated to short films and documentary scriptwriting, she says: “Many young filmmakers treat short films as a bridge to feature-length productions, and pack their scripts with too many ideas. Short-film is simply a short form of art with its own rules and dynamics and should be treated as such. The workshops will aim at developing or sharpening the young scriptwriters’ understanding of the short film format.”
Narrowing the intergenerational gap
While the festival creates many bridges between African countries, it is also a platform for the different generations of filmmakers and their audiences to narrow the intergenerational gaps. According to El Hosseiny, the festival invites young people to discover the artistic wealth, creativity and expertise of the older generation, while presenting new ideas and capabilities offered by the cinematic youth to the older generation.
The success of the Luxor festival is linked to the popularity and prosperity of Luxor as a key tourist hub, offering the city an opportunity to become the cinematic, cultural and geographic gateway to Africa. “As Egyptians, we often tend to look into our Mediterranean, North African or Middle Eastern cultural connections. But we are also an African country with many threads linking us with the rest of the continent,” El Hosseiny says.
“It is this cultural wealth that we celebrate during this festival.”
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