The long awaited Cimatheque Alternative Film Center opens as a platform for filmmakers and film lovers alike.
Launching its new premises with a programme titled Revisiting Memory, it includes film screenings, exhibitions and workshops. The programme will start with a special screening of The Dupes by Tawfik Saleh on 3 June, and will go on until 17 June to show films by other notable filmmakers including Atteyat El Abnoudy, Hossam Ali, Tahani Rachid, Said Marzouk, and animators Ali and Hossam Moheib.
The Dupes was produced in 1972, based on Ghassan Kanafani’s novella “Men in the Sun,” and follows Palestinian refugees in an attempt to cross the desert to Kuwait.
The film was produced with archival footage, and offers a critique of the era’s ideologies and the corruption of Arab regimes.
The Revisiting Memory programme was born out of the archives that Cimatheque’s team have stumbled upon and collected over two years.
Cimatheque’s archival collective includes material from commercial Egyptian cinema, advertisements, as well as amateur footage, home videos and independent films, and even unedited newsreels and documentaries.
According the their statement, Revisiting Memory is “an attempt to widen the conversation about cinema, ownership of history, and the veracity of contentious narratives.”
“It is hoped that the inclusion of different languages and aesthetics will help envision an alternative visual history, and unconventional reading of the past.”
