Highlights of the 6th Cairo Video Festival on show in Dubai

Still from Natalia Lozano Sanchez's, An Expression of Fingerspelling. Courtesy: DUCTAC

Today we welcome a new guest blogger to The Art Blog. Rachel Bennett brings us a review of the highlights of the Cairo Video Festival at Dubai Community Theatre & Arts Centre’s (Ductac).

by Rachel Bennett

Since the revolution, life in Egypt has increasingly relied on generators: many people have used them overcome power outages and surges.

The sixth edition of the Cairo Film Festival, highlights of which are screening at Ductac's Gallery of Light borrowed this premise to surmise an innovative daily capacity for dogged persistence.

The international selection, brought to the UAE for the first time, forges various alternatives to keep life in motion. Medrar, the non-profit organisation behind the film festival, were motivated by a need to “create alternative channels, [to] assimilate the creative energy bursting in the region despite the difficult production conditions.”

There is intimacy and intensity in viewing the collection, which features 27 films from 14 international filmmakers, looping on private screens. The selection is diverse and at turns, funny and sinister. It sometimes channels the revolutionary spirit and at other times, revels in experimental cinema.

Revolution is here, overtly; in Silent Majority the hubbub of an absent crowd is translated visually, empty city scenes are the backdrop to flickering audio levels, the volume surging and dipping with the crowd's emotions.

The films are frequently riven with the tension of juxtaposition. Undercurrents, Mai AlShazy's split-screen short, was created in a workshop for Egyptian filmmakers running alongside the festival. In it, a submerged underwater world and its elongated soundscape contrasts with the sharp, explosive rage of a young female attacking a punch bag. The space between the two is the meeting point of resistance and non-resistance, and the whole speaks of frustration. The active aggressor is in combat with a passive enemy, confined within her frame. The calm blues of the ocean feel thwarted too; the bubbling soundtrack continuous despite the assault adjacent.

In Refrain: (Verb) Marwa Benhalim recasts YouTube footage from instructional videos, layering an imploring refrain over the collage to instil poetry in the mundane. This disjointed visual and verbal is a technique also used in one of the exhibition's most unforgettable films. Robert, May, Rebeka is the study of three characters, each with their own unsettling narrative. The tripartite film is a formal exploration, a progression of tropes borrowed from horror, or perhaps war documentary. A voice, severed from the visual, is the detached anthropologist musing unemotionally on the life and death of the haunted figures on screen. The short is sinister and compulsive, prototypically uncanny without becoming kitsch.

Grappling with kitsch head on, French filmmaker Céline Trouillet does a take-two on Bonnie Tyler's romp through '80s bad taste in Song No. 22. In it, twins give an apathetic yet compelling rendition of Total Eclipse of the Heart, calling forth and laughing at our inner power-ballad: in our mind we play the video (it's been on repeat in my head since I left the exhibition) and feel foolish faced with a dead-eyed performance that challenges the emotional impact of the original.

Made in China, another workshop film, is littered with tat, first a Barbie on a bike stutters across the screen, unable to remain upright, her tinny plastic song playing haltingly as the wheels spin ineffectually. It's funny, but again, uncanny – capturing the weird anachronistic absurdity of endless plastic rubbish touted in Cairo's marketplaces. 'What revolution?' we might be prompted to ask.

This ‘generator’ propagates a determined, dual motion: local films articulate the energy of creative output, sustained despite adverse conditions, and the global films become a significant act of cultural appropriation that can cultivate further, greater energy. It’s a joy to see the selection transposed here to Dubai, a celebration of determined, fervent creativity.

* Cairo Video Festival: 6th Edition Highlights runs until Wednesday at The Gallery of Light, Ductac, Dubai. It is open daily from 9am – 10pm (2pm – 10pm Fridays). Admission is free.