All about this year’s Panorama of the European Film

November is becoming the kindest month to cinema lovers in Egypt. With the Cairo International Film Festival's impressive selection of films for LE10 a ticket on the Opera House grounds, who could ask for more? But there is.

For the eighth time since its 2004 inception, Panorama of the European Film returns from November 25 to December 5, with almost 60 mostly acclaimed films from Europe and the region. Some are fun, thrilling or fantastical and some grapple with the urgent issues of our times, such as economic recession, forced migration and legacies of conflict. Some do both.

Screenings in Alexandria (Cinema Amir), Tanta (Cinema Rivoli) and Minya (Cinema Cityscape) as well as Cairo make this year's the widest outreach for the Panorama yet. It's thanks to young people in those governerates reaching out and showing enthusiasm for the Panorama that these collaborations were possible, Panorama head Marianne Khoury told the press.

Run by Misr International Films – Youssef Chahine (MIF) and seen as setting the stage for Cairo's art house cinema Zawya (also founded and run by MIF), the Panorama is a film event many Cairo film buffs eagerly anticipate from year to year given their carefully selected features, shorts and documentaries.

In Cairo, the program is largely between Downtown's Zawya and Karim cinemas, along with suburban screenings at Plaza (6^th of October City) and Point 90 (New Cairo), but some films are shown at the Goethe Institute, The French Institute and the Italian Culture Center.

This year there's 37 features, 12 documentaries and 16 shorts in several sections. Here's our brief guide to it all.

European Cinema

We would say watch all of the films in this carefully selected main section if you possibly can. But some look totally unmissable.

These include British director Andrew Haighs' 45 Years, a film starring Charlotte Rampling about how some news about the past disturbs a 45-year-old marriage, widely praised as deeply affecting. Young Spanish director Carlos Vermut's Magical Girl, a dark tragicomic crime thriller, looks rather brilliant if you're into that kind of thing, and veteran Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti's My Mother, about a film director dealing with a difficult lead actor (John Turturro) and the imminent death of her mother, has been very well received.

Word is that Stéphane Brizé's The Measure of a Man, populated mostly by non-actors and deals with the everyday in bad economic times, is wonderfully gripping. Victoria, a heist movie in the form of a single two-hour shot from German director Sebastian Schipper and starring Laia Costa, is said to be more than just an incredible technical feat.

Mateo Garrone's adaptions of fairytales by 17th century Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile (in Tale of Tales) are meant to be pretty strange and wild, and Far From the Madding Crowd, a period drama from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen) starring Carey Mulligan, looks like a lot of fun.

Also intriguing are a dry comedy from Iceland about sheep farmer that triumphed at Cannes (Grímur Hákonarson's Rams) and an intense animated docudrama (Anca Damian's The Magic Mountain) about Adam Jacek Winkler, a Polishman who fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

Carte blanche

Carte Blanche was introduced to the program last year. It's a nice section of the Panorama, in which prominent Egyptian film people each select a European film that has influenced them or that they admire. This year, veteran director Mohamed Khan has chosen a film from the gritty leftish British New Wave that one can see echoes of in his own work: it's the great late filmmaker Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), which some people feel has become rather dated and others say is a great British classic.

Hala Galal chose Finnish writer-director and arch stylist Aki Kaurismäki's 2012 noirish, humorous Le Havre, about an old shoeshiner who tries to shelter a young undocumented migrant from the long arm of French law, and Amr Salama offers Alejandro Amenabar's The Sea Inside, a tearjerker about a quadriplegic ex-sailor (Javier Bardem) that's based on a true story.

Documentary Rendez-Vous

Every year Panorama brings Egypt a rare chance to see documentaries in cinemas. This year, the section brings several award-winning films, perhaps the most famous or notorious of which is Asif Kapadia's Amy, about six-time Grammy award winning musician Amy Winehouse, who died at 27. Amy was nominated for awards at Cannes and Edinburgh film festivals this year.

There are also various character-driven Eastern European works. Alexandre Nanau's Toto and His Sisters follows Roma children who live by themselves after their mother's arrest in a rundown Bucharest neighborhood. In Agneiszka Zweifka's The Queen of Silence, 10-year-old Denisa, an undocumented citizen of a gypsy camp in Poland, is silent because no one diagnosed her with hearing disability. Denisa spends her time dancing, through imitating women on a Bollywood DVD she found. There is also Yula's Dream/Something Better to Come by Hanna Polak, the director behind the critically acclaimed, Academy-award-nominated The Children of Leningradsky (2005). Polak follows 13-year old Yula, who lives in a bleak fringe of Moscow.

Another exciting documentary is Human by French director Yann Arthus Bertrand, of acclaimed documentary Home (2009). This 180-minute feast offers a collection stories and images on what it means to be human from a variety of cultural perspectives.

Besides new releases, there are documentaries by celebrated French director Nicolas Philibert, such as Every Little Thing (1996), which follows the annual play which is put on by residents and staff at the La Borde psychiatric clinic, and In the Land of the Deaf (1993), and To be and to Have (2002), about a group of children who despite being varied in age are all taught together in the school’s single room, and their incredible teacher. Finally, one of his latest endeavours, La Maison de La Radio (2013), where he shows the behind-the-scenes at Radio France.

Emerging Directors

This is the Panorama's special focus on first or second-time directors whose works have been recognized somewhere in the world. This year's selection revolves around family-centred films and films telling stories of communities living on the fringes of society.

In Erol Mintas' debut Song of my Mother, first-time independent director Ali lives in Istanbul with his mother, who dreams of returning to her Kurdish village. The film won several awards at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival and the Heart of Sarajevo award for best film.

The black-and-white feature In The Crosswind (Estonia 2014) by Martti Helde is based on a true story set in 1941 in Serbia whereby thousands fled to from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to be greeted with starvation and inhumane conditions.

Tom Browne's Radiator portrays a family living in a remote cottage and the challenges that arise when their son arrives from London to look after his aging parents. The film won the audience award in Glasgow earlier this year.

Crossroads

A new section called Crossroads offers five films that have emerged out of exchanges and co-productions between Europe and “the Arab world.” They are all gritty, angry, political pieces, from Letter to the King, a tight drama about some Kurdish people living in a refugee shelter in Norway, to Shawkat Amin Korki's Memories on Stone, a fiction about the difficulties of making a film about Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against of Iraq’s non-Arab, mainly Kurdish population, to Yasmin Fedda’s documentary Queens of Syria, which follows a 2013 theatre project with Syrian refugee women in Amman to stage a version of Euripides’s tragedy, The Trojan Women. Also included is The Bride's Side, a documentary celebrating an audaciously disguised act of disobedience in Europe that Laura Cugusi has written about eloquently for Mada.

Balkan Focus

Panorama is spotlighting films from the Balkan region to mark the 20^th anniversary of the end of the Bosnia-Herzegovina war (1992-1995). While many Balkan films are included in several other sections, this special program curates five films telling stories of war-torn societies and their contemporary issues.

One very exciting entry is Good Night Sarajevo, a documentary by Edu Marin and Olivier Algora on the return of journalist Boban Minic from exile in Spain to Sarajevo and his activism on Radio Sarajevo during the war.

In Goran Radovanovic's drama Eclave (Serbia, Germany), a young Christian boy defies ethnic cleansing and conflict to make friends with children from Kosovo's Muslim majority, and The High Sun (Croatia) by Dalibor Matanic captures three forbidden love stories in three consecutive decades in villages burdened with histories of ethnic hatred. It won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes this year, and just this weekend, the Prize for Best Artistic Contribution at the Cairo International Film Festival.

Classics

Two of the three “classics” offered this year go way back. Sometimes called the first sound film released in France, L’Eau Du Nil (1928) is a love triangle drama set in Cairo and Upper Egypt and sounds more like a curiosity than a masterpiece. Marius (1931) by French novelist, playwright and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, is set in Marseilles and has more cinematic merits. The third film is Roman Polanski's epic Thomas Hardy adaptation, Tess (1979).

And...

There is also a program of short films from Greece dealing with its economic crisis. Finally, the annual tribute to a filmmaker is dedicated this year to fantastically prolific Portuguese director Manoel De Oliveira, who passed away at the age of 106 in April, with four of his films.

Although as always it would be nice to have more films from our own region screened here, and that's especially true right after a rather eurocentric edition of the Cairo film festival, it's difficult to complain with so many mouthwatering films on the Panorama program.

Ticket prices vary, according to cinemas, from LE20 to LE50. Students and industry professionals can buy passes, while the press are given a free passes for morning shows. Passes can be obtained at Zawya cinema between 4 pm and 7 pm until November 24.