Tips from the culture desk: Cimatheque and Praed return, and a new cinema club opens

With two state festivals taking place, it’s going to be an exciting week in Cairo and Alexandria. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina Summer Festival continues with concerts and performances, and the National Theater Festival starts in Cairo on July 15. There’s also plenty of music and screenings elsewhere — and an unusual exhibition.

Praed at Teatro Alexandria — Sunday

Praed is a Beirut-based duo made up of visual artist and musician Raed Yassin and artist Paed Conca. Exploring connections between Arab shaabi music and other psychedelic and hypnotic music genres such as free jazz and psychedelic rock, they have performed all over Europe and in Cairo, back when nightclub-cum-art-space Vent was still around.

7 pm, July 16 at Teatro Eskendria basement, 25 Fouad Street, Raml Station, Alexandria. Free.

Do it بالعربي at Townhouse — Tuesday

In this exhibition organized by the Sharjah Art Foundation and Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist (who came up with the concept in 1993), the Townhouse gallery team and the public are prompted to reconsider the past by responding to written instructions from over 70 regional artists that anyone can interpret to make a new work of art. Contributors include filmmaker Ahmed Ghossein, Sondos Shabayek, Lara Baladi and Etel Adnan.

Opening 7 pm, July 18, Townhouse, 6 Nabrawy Street, downtown Cairo. Free.

Cimatheque’s July program — all week

Luckily for film buffs, Zawya’s temporary closure for the past month is about to get less debilitating: Cimatheque is putting together a summer film program on Saturdays, Sundays and Tuesdays. This week they show French director David Yon’s The Night and the Kid (2015), in which a young man and a child wander the Atlas highlands, evading pursuit by armed men (French and Arabic with English subtitles) and US director Kelly Reichardt’s recent drama Certain Women, on four women’s intersecting lives in a small Montana town (English, no subtitles).

The program can be found here. 19A Adly Street, 5th floor, apartment 28/29, downtown Cairo. Tickets LE15, or LE100 for a program ticket. 

Mohamed Khan shorts — Thursday

Garden City cinema education space Cima is starting a series of screenings meant to operate as a cinema club, with discussions after each screening. In honor of recently departed director Mohamed Khan, Cima screens two of his rarely seen short films: Leqaa Aely (Family Meeting, 1983) and Al-Sebaq Al-Taweel (The Long Race, 1989). A discussion led by critic Ahmed Shawky will follow. Both films and the discussion will be in Arabic.

6 pm, July 20, Cima, 8 Rostom Street, 2nd floor, apartment 5, Garden City, Cairo. Free.