At this year’s Cairo Film Festival, the spotlight was on the past, as the event introduced a new section dedicated to celebrating heritage films. This year marked the 45th edition of the festival, which showcased 10 iconic titles, including The Lonely Wife and The Color of Pomegranates, to honor film legends Satyajit Ray and Sergei Parajanov on their centenaries. The festival also featured 4K restorations of classics like The Godfather Part II, The Thief of Baghdad, and Cleopatra.
The festival premiered 14 newly remastered Egyptian cinema milestones as part of the expanded Cairo Classics program. This restoration initiative has become a key focus for the festival’s new leadership, under President Hussein Fahmy and Artistic Director Essam Zakarea. Their goal is to preserve and promote Egyptian cinema, which is among the oldest in the world, but faces the challenge of deteriorating archives.
“We’re losing historic films every month,” Zakarea said. “The majority of classic Egyptian cinema has not yet been digitized, so we are working to change that.”
The Cairo Classics section first began in 2022 with the restoration of Diary of a Country Prosecutor and A Song on the Passage. The success of the section led Fahmy to push for more restorations, uncovering a library of nearly 1,400 heritage titles in need of a technological makeover. With both public and private support, including assistance from the Egyptian Media Production City’s Audio-Visual Heritage Restoration Center, the festival has been able to restore, clean, and subtitle many damaged films.
Each restoration costs about E£100,000 ($2,014), and subtitles add an additional E£20,000 ($402), making it an affordable initiative with wide-reaching potential for global exposure.
This year, the festival showcased restored films from celebrated filmmakers like Salah Abou Seif, with titles such as Cairo 30 and The Thug, as well as Palace Walk and Palace of Desire by Hassan El-Imam. Many of these films are based on the works of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.
The screenings were well received, especially in suburban cinemas, and the festival president has received international interest, with requests coming from various countries to restore other classic films.
“We view our cinema as a living art,” Zakarea explained. “We don’t distinguish between old and new. These classics only grow in strength as time passes.”