The jury of the 68th annual Venice Film Festival awarded Egypt’s “Tahrir 2011" – which premiered on Friday as an out-of-competition selection – with the CICT-UNESCO “Enrico Fulchignoni” Award.
In its presentation of the January uprising, co-directors Tamer Ezzat, Ayten Amin and Amr Salama, as well as producers Mohamed Hefzi and Frederick Schiller, group the events under three main themes: the Good, the Bad and the Politician. The first segment profiles the protesters and is directed by Ezzat, while the second and third deal with the police forces and former President Hosni Mubarak, and are directed by Amin and Salama, respectively.
Despite the film's unconventional approach, it remains engaging and coherent, with the filmmakers qualified to provide personal accounts of the events, as they were filming within the protests. This approach mirrors that of Mohamed Bayoumi, an Egyptian cinema icon who participated in the 1919 revolution and reflected on it in his documentary films.
“Tahrir 2011” is the second Egyptian film to win the CICT-UNESCO award at the festival, after Shady Abdel Salam’s short “Al-Falah al-Faseih” (The Eloquent Farmer) in 1970.
Translated from the Arabic Edition
