Shadi El-Noshokaty, "Kaiser" Mohamed Fatthi Moussa, Hala Galal, Emad Mabrouk, moderated by Viola Shafik

Cairo, the hotspot of the Middle East, has regained its importance over the last decade in both the amount and quality of productions to assert its position at the centre of film and art production in the Middle East. What was once the "most beautiful city in the world" in the early 1900s is now a busy crowded metropolis. Artists and filmmakers have made the hardness and chaos of the city a source of inspiration. At the same time, an increasingly globalized private sector in a world of mass media, movies and art, has paved the way for new forums. These factors have assisted artists and film­makers­ to redefine their relationship to the political sector.­ Some of the key players in the Cairo film scene discuss the emergence of a new cultural scene, the opening up of alter­native spaces for film and art in this city teeming with millions, which has also succeeded in attracting new audiences. They will reflect on the various aspects that have led to the development of an emerging independent film and video scene despite a film industry and a ­conservative state-controlled cultural environment, and the extent to which film or culture in general succeeds in achieving an autonomous space for reflection and for transmitting alternatives.

Hala Galal, Michèle Ohayon, Anders Ostergaard, moderated by Matthijs Wouter Knol

Sifting the world through your camera and hopefully bringing out representations of reality, including emotional, physical and factual reality, requires exceptional filmmaking skills. An innate curiosity combined with the resolve to seek the reality beneath the surface is sometimes not sufficient when depicting capricious situations and events.

Documentary filmmakers often shoot under hardship conditions and relying on unpredictable elements, they must put together a convincing argument in the form of a compelling narrative. As filmmaker Michèle Ohayon said in an interview on her documentary, Steal a Pencil for Me,“in my best scenarios, I wish that this will happen or that will happen, but I know that something entirely different may happen, too.“ For a non-fiction filmmaker, working in a visual medium means constantly translating “reality“ into good cinema.

So what does a filmmaker do in a situation where the script becomes inadequate in the face of reality, which turns out to lead the shooting process and sweeps all the characters in a completely unexpected direction? Panellist Anders Østergaard narrates his experience while shooting Burma VJ – Reporting from a Closed Country, when real-life events meddled in ways that hindered him from treating his material as originally planned. It is equally challenging to make a film that presents no pre-packaged opinion on the status of Egyptian women today, as filmmaker, scriptwriter and producer Hala Galal has achieved in her film Women’s Chit Chat, which deals with generations of feminists in Egypt.

These high-profile experts delve into the reality that documentary filmmakers deal with, discussing also how to go about making films under extreme circumstances, where the film moves beyond any sense of reality?