ADFF’s screening of old classics will enliven this year’s film festival – and delight new fans
Film buffs will be salivating at the line-up, released yesterday, for this year’s Abu Dhabi Film Festival. But while it is easy to get excited about the new films to be premièred – in particular From A to B, the follow-up to City of Life, or the Egyptian-Emirati production El Ott, about an Egyptian gangster – there is much to be said for films that were made last century.
As part of a collaboration with Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation/World Cinema Project, a series of older films will be screened. Some will be familiar to western film buffs: the French director Francois Truffaut will have some of his classic films screened, most of which date back to the 1960s. In particular, his classic Jules Et Jim, which premièred in 1962, still retains the power to entertain – and, indeed, shock. Other older films, less well-known in the west, such as Manila in the Claws of Light, from 1975, are classics in Filipino cinema.
These films are rarely shown in cinemas and it is hard to find them on the various film networks in the west and the east. They are available online, of course, but the magic of the cinema is lost viewed on a stuttering screen. That, indeed, is the great value of ADFF’s showing of these films: they bring a new audience to great films, and allow those who saw them the first time the opportunity to reminisce.
