Ambassador of Argentina inaugurates "Cinema… Memory of a Place" at Ismailia Festival
Within the activities of the 24th Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts, Ambassador of Argentina to Egypt, Gonzalo Urriolabeitia, and his wife, Gabriela Lorena Valdivieso, inaugurated the exhibition "Cinema... Memory of a Place", in the presence of Dr. Khaled Abdel Jalil, Advisor to the Minister of Culture for Cinema Affairs, editor Manar Hosni, head of the National Cinema Center, and film critic Essam Zakaria, the Festival's Director.
In cooperation with Ismailia festival, "Babmsr” website is organizing the "Cinema... Memory of a Place" exhibition, which includes paintings for artists Ahmed Ezzat, Ibrahim Al-Baridi, Ihab Abdel-Ghaffar and others.
The exhibition features 40 paintings by 20 artists. Paintings main idea focus on memory and its relationship to cinema, the image of the city, and how cinema can turn into a means of documenting the city and its world of public places and gardens that bear a special character and are icons in the visual awareness of the public such as the Giza Zoo. Paintings idea addresses as well the influence of some cinematic scenes on the artists' memoryby reshaping influential scenes in cinema through their paintings that include some famous cinematic scenes for stars as Fouad al-Muhandis, Taheya Karyoka and others.
A seminar with the same title was held in the small hall of the Ismailia Culture Palace and was moderated by the writer, critic and historian Mohamad Shoeir. The seminar discussed the idea of memory and the city, and screened the film "The Secret". The film monitors the spiritual journey of thousands of followers of the Sufi pole, Abu Al-Hassan Al-Shazly, which the hardship of the road did not prevent them from taking it.
This was followed by speeches by HE Ambassador Urriolabeitia and Talal Afifi, producer of the film "From Sudan to Argentina" directed by Ricardo Preve. "From Sudan to Argentina", which was then screened, revolves around the period when the construction of the High Dam in Aswan threatened to destroy the ancient Egyptian monuments in Nubia during the sixties, and the meeting of archaeologists from around the world to save these precious pieces of history.