Egypt's 'The Blue Elephant 2' to open Denmark's Aarhus Arab Film Festival
Ahram Online, , Thursday 1 Oct 2020
The festival's second edition is scheduled to take place 2-7 October


The Aarhus Arab Film Festival (AAFF) will kick off its activities Friday, 2 October, with a versatile line-up of films from the Arab region.

Among films to be screened are entries from Egypt, including The Blue Elephant 2 (2019), which will open the festival's second edition.

Based on the novel by Ahmed Mourad, The Blue Elephant was a smash hit when it was released in Egypt in 2014. Directed by Marwan Hamed and starring Egyptian leading actors Karim Abdel Aziz, Nelly Karim and Hind Sabri, the film saw an equally successful sequel released in 2019.

According to IMDB, The Blue Elephant 2 focuses on "a meeting with a new inmate in the psychiatric hospital who flips Dr Yehia's life upside down; he prophesies that the death of his entire family is only three days away.”

The Danish festival will also screen Kilo 64, a documentary written and directed by Amir El-Shenawy.

Kilo 64 is about the journey of an ambitious pharmacy graduate who shifts his career and starts a farming business at Kilo 64 off the Cairo-Alexandria desert road. Moved by the spirit of the January 25 Revolution, Wael El-Shenawy, 24, starts an agriculture startup with the aim to make a social impact. But not everything goes as planned.

Kilo 64, filmed over two years, is a tale of two generations as it follows the journey of a young entrepreneur who's trying to revive his father’s dream. A simple personal story that reveals much about what happened in Egypt in recent decades.

The Aarhus Arab Film Festival does not provide a concise line-up of scheduled films on its website. The information provided by the festival's Facebook page points to screenings of films such as I Bleed, a documentary by Leah Manasseh (Lebanon); Roll’em, a feature film by Saudi director Abdulelah Alqurashi, 3 Exits by Danish-Palestinian Mahdi Fleifel, alongside meetings with filmmakers and music evenings.

According to the festival's website, AAFF's "goal is to show the vast diversity of the Arab world by providing an insight into Arabic films, cultures and thoughts through the organisation of an internationally-oriented film festival aimed at a Danish audience, with the best of the Arab film world."

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