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Abu Dhabi Film Festival to Celebrate 100th Birthday of Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz
During his very long life, Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz was
credited with two important "firsts" - he was the first Arab
author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1988),
and he was the first Arab author to devote much of his
energy to the movies. The Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF)
announced today that to mark the 100th anniversary of the
birth of this unique and enormously influential artist, it
will present screenings of eight major films drawn from his
work, many in newly struck or newly subtitled copies, to mark
its fifth edition October 13-22. In addition, it will publish
a monograph on Mahfouz and cinema, mount an exhibition of posters
of films drawn from Mahfouz's work, and present a roundtable
discussion.
Born in Cairo in 1911, Mahfouz published his first novel in
1939, and continued his remarkably prolific career which saw
him produce no less than 30 novels and more than 100 short
stories, until 1994. In that year, the knife wounds he suffered in
an assassination attempt by a religious fanatic made it difficult
for him to use his right arm and hand for more than half an
hour a day, severely curtailing his artistic activity for the
remaining dozen years of his life. Since the 1940s Mahfouz earned
his principal living as a civil servant, working in a variety
of government departments related to culture and cinema. In
fact, for a while he was director of the Office of
Film Censorship. But starting in the late 1940s he had also
begun to write screenplays and was eventually credited with
more than 25 original screenplays.
Not only were Mahfouz's works brought to the screen by some of
Egypt's most notable directors, including Salah Abou Seif,
Youssef Chahine, Hassan Al Imam, Kamal Al Sheikh, Ali
Badrakhan and Tawfik Saleh, but two of his novels were
the inspiration for a couple of Mexico's major directors,
Jorge Fons and Arturo Ripstein. ADFF's series will include
films by most of these filmmakers, and several of them
are expected to attend. The retrospective will also include
the two Mexican films, which have rarely been screened in the
Middle East. Most of Mahfouz's fiction has been translated
into English and published by the American University of Cairo
Press. After he received the Nobel Prize, his
worldwide readership increased incrementally, and no less a
luminary than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then an editor at
Doubleday in New York, came to Cairo to meet him
and championed the first American publication of The Cairo
Trilogy, his most famed work.
Commenting on this remarkable series, Eissa Saif Al Mazrouei,
who as the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage's
Director of Special Projects heads the ADFF team, said, "The
Festival takes this opportunity to reaffirm the importance
of honoring the art of film by presenting important examples
from the history of cinema and by supporting their
preservation and restoration in order to share them
with today's new audiences. Thanks to the cooperation of the
Egyptian Ministry of Culture and the Egyptian Film Center, it will
be possible to for us to present newly struck or newly
subtitled copies of five of the films chosen for the retrospective.
These screenings and other events relating to Mahfouz during
the film festival will offer a unique chance to lovers of film
and lovers of books throughout the United Arab Emirates to
enjoy the work of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century,
a man whose influence upon both literature and cinema is
widely recognized as being without equal."
Peter Scarlet, Executive Director of ADFF, remarked, "Mahfouz's
depiction of the lives of his countrymen is so broad and so
penetrating, whether in his early works in which he depicted
Egypt's ancient past or later work when he focused on the lives of
Cairo's lower middle class, that he's sometimes been compared
to Balzac - and that's a comparison of which very few authors
are worthy. At this moment in history, as the world turns its
attention anew toward that ancient and fascinating nation, the work
of Naguib Mahfouz, both on the page and on screen, gives a
unique sense of what life was like there for much of the
preceding century. In addition, throughout much of his
career Mahfouz was an extremely cinematic writer, using devices
like flashbacks and parallel montage to bring his characters
to life on the page. And in his screenplays, as in his novels,
he moved freely between genres and historical eras. In short,
he was a master of many realms."
Intishal Al Timimi, an ADFF programmer and the main curator of
the program, added, "We recognize the impossibility of fully
encompassing Mahfouz's long career in this retrospective, but
we hope to shed light on some of the key landmarks in the
creative path of the writer of such important novels as
The Children of Gebalawi, The Beginning and the End,
and The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire,
Sugar Street. To this end, ADFF has chosen to
present a multi-faceted program that reflects Mahfouz's
diversity, offering something both for his admirers and for
those who are just discovering this 'cinéaste of
literature'."
Further details on the Mahfouz retrospective at Abu Dhabi Film
Festival will be announced in the coming months.
ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
The Abu Dhabi Film Festival (formerly the Middle East
International Film Festival) was established in 2007, with the
aim of helping to create a vibrant film culture throughout the
region. Presented each October by the Abu Dhabi Authority
for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) under the patronage of H.E.
Sheikh Sultan Bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, Chairman of Abu Dhabi
Authority for Culture and Heritage, the event is committed to
curating exceptional programs to engage and educate the
local community, inspire filmmakers and nurture the growth of
the regional film industry.
With its commitment to presenting works by Arab filmmakers in
competition alongside those by major talents of world cinema,
the Festival offers Abu Dhabi's diverse and enthusiastic
audiences a means of engaging with their own and
others' cultures through the art of cinema. At the same time,
a strong focus on the bold new voices of Arab cinema connects
with Abu Dhabi's role as a burgeoning cultural capital in the
region and marks the Festival as a place for the world to discover
and gauge the pulse of recent Arab filmmaking.
To contact the Press Office, email press@adff.ae or call +971 2 556
4590.
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