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Antoine Khalife on Treasures Unearthed at Red Sea Film Festival With Focus on Musicals, Films

Seven classic feature films, to be screened for the first time in Saudi Arabia, are showing at the Red Sea Film Festival’s Treasures sidebar in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Director of Arab programs and film classics Antoine Khalife tells Variety: “We really wanted to focus this year on the musical, as well as films about cinema itself.”

Films with a musical theme include a screening of a 4K restoration of Fatih Akin’s 2005 documentary about the music scene in Turkey “Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul” and Jacques Demy’s classic French musical “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort,” starring Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac and Gene Kelly from 1967.

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“From the Arab world, we wanted to have something unusual: ‘The Victory of Youth,’ which stars Farid Al-Atrash and Asmahan,” Khalife says. The real-life siblings play brother and sister singer-musicians looking for fame via the silver screen. “We looked really hard to find a negative so we could work on it.” The fresh restoration was carried out in partnership with Egyptian Media Production City, which also partnered on the restoration of “My Wife’s Goblin,” a romantic comedy from 1968 and directed by Fatin Abdel Wahab. “The film is about a woman who likes movies a lot and when she sees films, she likes to act like the heroine of the film. So when she saw ‘Irma la Douce,’ she decided to become like her, a seductress.”

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This reflection on cinema and connection to the past is vital, as Khalife sees it, in the relatively new festival. “We are a young festival if I may say,” he admits. “It’s only been three years, but cinema is something inside you. I would like to continue this theme next year because we didn’t have everything we wanted. We wanted to have more.”

The restorations were an important element of the festival’s mission, Khalife says. “That was huge. In a country like Saudi Arabia, where until recently the cinema was not very strong, how can we do something related to heritage? We’ve been looking for films that have never been shown here properly. People watched films on TV, not on a big screen. We found some documentaries and some images from the sixties filmed here, but no films as such. Then we discover that here in people’s memories, Egyptian cinema was everywhere, on the television and the music. And so we decided to recreate what people used to watch on TV, but now restored in 4K and on the big screen.”

With the Red Sea Film Festival moving into its new premises next year, Khalife sees room for expansion both in terms of creating an archive and establishing a regional center for restoration and exhibition: “Next year, we’ll have the big building for the festival. I want to create a big exhibition but also I want to work on the archives, and with the help of many cinematheques from the region, because this is something that is missing. And not just films from the Egyptian cinema, I would like to work with the Algerians, with the Moroccans, with the Lebanese, with many. My own target is really to have restored some unexpected film, and to be able to watch it and to organize an exhibition with a theme. I’m fighting for this.”

The section also includes two documentaries on director and former “Monty Python” artist and actor Terry Gilliam, “Lost in La Mancha” (2002) and “He Dreams of Giants” (2019), directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, speak to the dangers and pitfalls of cinema, a literally Quixotic pursuit in Gilliam’s case. Khalife’s team are intent on protecting and promoting such pursuits.

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