FestBeat: This year’s Panorama is about love (day 1)

As FestBeat continues with coverage of the Panorama of the European Film, over the next 10 days I'll be offering my speculations, reviews and maybe the occasional rant. Exciting times – and let me tell you that love is in the air.  

The Panorama has a very interesting, distinct vibe this year. With screenings spanning venues and cinemas across downtown Cairo, the city becomes part of the experience. As you exit Zawya or Cinema Karim you’re hit with the city’s smells, noises and rhythms. You have to take something of Cairo with you into the black box and take something from in there back to the city – a mood, a temperament, a bodily rhythm, a sense of despair, sorrow, love. Regardless, you become more in tune to the city around you with all its sensory stimulations.

Befittingly, Labor on the Douro River (Manoel de Oliveira, 1931) is screening as part of the de Oliveira tribute. It’s a short that takes the form of what has been called a “city symphony,” a type of documentary inaugurated by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) and explored further in Dziga Vertov’s Russian avant-garde masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera (1929).

These filmmakers and their city symphony films embody a dream of cinema as a universal language. A cinema of physical affects, movements and sounds that pierce the spectator, connecting him or her to fellow spectators, commuters on public transport, city dwellers. Through exploring our common “fabric of the sensible,” the sensorial impact that connects us as inhabitants of a modern metropolis, city symphony films have a utopian view of cinema’s role. So long as we have a body, we all experience the rhythms of a jazz beat, regardless of our language, worldview, beliefs, principles or categories of meaning. This belief that cinema can offer something beyond language is the reason people have seen in cinema a way to create a universal understanding reliant on affective engagement and sensory overflows.

The eighth Panorama of the European Film renews this dream. As festival director Marianne Khoury said yesterday during the opening screening at Cinema Karim, it hopes to build more bridges between the people of Egypt and Europe at a time when there seems to be a chasm growing between the two. It is presented as a journey, a process to undo old prejudices and extend new lines of understanding.

I rarely sit close to the screen when I’m at the cinema. Only in very few films do I feel the urge to move closer. Nanni Moretti’s latest film Mia Madre (My Mother, 2015) is one of them. Moretti has mastered the art of creating a cinematic tone, an atmosphere. His plays with light, movement and colors are so powerful that you just want to lose yourself in his films. You want to get as close as possible to experience the full intensity of its sensory fabric, its affective tides. My Mother follows a director who is also making a film. It is a film about film, it is a film that makes you fall in love again with film.

(It shows today at 1 pm at Cinema Karim, at 5 pm on November 30 at Tanta’s Cinema Rivoli, at Sheikh Zayed’s Plaza on the same day at 6.45 pm, and at 6.45 pm on December 5 at Zawya.)

The Panorama seems to be to be about love this year. About our love for one another as human beings, for a city that has changed our sensorium forever, and for a medium that has thrived on exploring love. I now know why I heard rumors that the Panorama is the cinephiles’ festival. The program celebrates the intangible affective power of the medium.

You have whet my appetite, Panorama. Way to go.