The first round showcased critically acclaimed features including Pedro Almodóvar’s Oscar-winning Talk to Her (2002) and Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club (1999). Founded by Marianne Khoury, the event is now organised by Youssef Al-Shazly and a young team who have been expanding into provinces outside Cairo.
The new, 18th round featured Oliver Laxe’s Sirat, which won Cannes’ Jury Prize and several other awards in different festivals. The title is a classical Arabic word for “path”, which has a religious connotation in Islamic culture. It is a bridge over hell that people must cross to reach paradise on the Day of Judgement, described as being finer than a hair and sharper than a sword. The script, written by Laxe and Santiago Fillol, consists mainly of a road trip through the deserts and mountains of Morocco. The film opens with a group of hippies installing massive speakers in an open area surrounded by mountains in the Moroccan desert. Later that night, the party starts with techno music and dancers. One intriguing shot that captures the mood shows a dancer embracing the speaker as if to absorbing the sound directly.
Luis (Sergi López) and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) are in their family van looking for Luis’ daughter, who seems to be at one of several such raves, with the help of locals and hippies. This depiction of people facing an existential crisis in the wilderness is full of trauma and tragedy, but there is no coherent structure or meaningful motives for the characters. Rather, the idea of the sirat underlying the human condition is the focus. López is the only professional actor involved, and along with the name of Almodóvar as its producer this helped to garner a positive reception.
At El Gouna Film Festival last October, I missed both screenings of Raoul Peck’s Orwell 2+2=5, which I was lucky enough to be able to see at the Panorama. Peck’s 2018 I Am Not Your Negro, based on an interview with the great writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924-1987), won a BAFTA and some 30 other awards. This time the hero is Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell (1903-1950), perhaps Britain’s best-known political writer, and author of the novels 1984 and Animal Farm.
The film opens and closes with mysterious microscopic images that, as it turns out, depict the tuberculosis that killed Orwell, but much of its substance focuses on 1984, benefiting from previous film versions of the novel. The “2+2=5” of the title is a reference to how authorities distort the truth. Totalitarianism, as he shows again and again, can emerge even in the most liberal societies. Peck uses news footage of politicians, wars, and protests to suggest that the world we are now living in is not so different from the dystopias Orwell predicted. The dystopian slogans of 1984 — War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength — can be seen on banners in a very wide range of contexts. In this and other ways Peck blends the reality of the world as it is, both now and in the time of Orwell, with the concepts of his two seminal novels. Big brother becomes Stalin, Franco, Pinochet, Marcos, Bush, Putin, Trump and Netanyahu. Peace comes up in the context of unjustified wars in Iraq, Ukraine, Lebanon and Gaza. “Strength” takes the form of MAGA campaigns and the 2020 storming of the Capitol.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 December, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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