Squeezed in between auto parts shops and cafes off the crowded avenues of downtown Cairo, no blaring marquee announces this cinema. Instead look for a small blue doorway, marked by a discrete neon calligraphy sign and sometimes an old Peugeot parked across the street playing films projected onto its windshield.
The car once belonged to the late Youssef Chahine, Egypt’s most lauded movie director, who in a career that spanned six decades made films with a social conscience that challenged censors and broke with the dominant big-studio system.
Behind the door, a project launched by the production company he founded aims to bring films in that tradition to a new audience. The 170-seat Zawya cinema hopes to generate a market for alternative, international or independent films in Egypt, where one of the world’s oldest movie industries has fallen into decline.
Bad days for cinema Egypt currently produces only around 20 films a year, less than a quarter of its peak late last century. Its funding and profits have been hit hard by DVD pirating and downloads, as well as growing religious conservatism. Three years of instability following Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising only worsened the picture. The films that do get made are largely geared towards a quick buck slapdash comedies and over-the-top melodramas with poor production values.
Pro-democracy activists may have seen their political hopes dashed this past year amid a crackdown on Morsy supporters and on free speech in general. But some cultural initiatives inspired by the revolutionary fervour of the past three years have survived.
Zawya opened with Wadjda, the first Saudi movie directed by a woman, which tells the story of a young girl’s quest to ride a bicycle an act forbidden by the conservative kingdom’s clerics.
Later, it played Jim Jarmusch’s vampire-chic Only Lovers Left Alive, and Asghar Farhadi’s drama The Past.
Zawya, built into an annex of a onetime movie palace-turned multiplex, sells several dozen tickets per day, its box office says, while special premier screenings have filled it beyond capacity.
Unusual targets With its downtown location, it aims to reach out to groups not normally targeted by such an eclectic selection. It also fits into a push to revitalize Cairo’s rundown city centre a herculean challenge given the grave disrepair into which many of its 19th and early 20th century buildings have fallen.
Due to open later this year a few blocks away is another alternative film centre, the Cinematheque. It bills itself as a space for filmmakers and film-lovers to watch, learn about and create cinema, as well as draw in a broader public.
Located next to Cairo’s old Synagogue, it will feature screening facilities, workshop spaces, an international archive and a processing lab for analogue film.
