Egyptians Win at BBC’s Aan Korb Festival

The first edition of the BBC Arabic Film and Documentary Festival showcased the work of professional filmmakers and citizen journalists

Kate Durham 

  Egyptians won two of five awards at Aan Korb (Up Close), the first BBC Arabic Film and Documentary Festival, presented at the closing ceremony in London on November 3. The festival ran October 31-November 3 at the Radio Theater at BBC Broadcasting House.   Naji Ismail won Best Documentary for Om Amira, about a woman from Aswan who now lives on a Downtown rooftop. Om Amira is the sole breadwinner for her husband and two daughters, supporting them from the meager proceeds selling fried potatoes near Tahrir Square. “I prefer my characters ordinary,” Ismail explained in video screened at the festival. “I feel that the details in their daily lives deserve to be shown on screen.”   Hailing from Upper Egypt and now based in Cairo, Ismail earned a degree in directing from the High Cinema Institute in 2005, and in 2012 founded Rahala, a production and distribution company. His 2011 work Hekayet El Thawra (Stories of the Revolution) won several awards.   Journalist and documentary maker Abdelfattah Farag received a BBC Young Journalist Award for his film Patience, about the lives of people who have turned to garbage collecting to earn a living. “In recent years, this phenomenon has spread a great deal,” Farag, a Faculty of Media graduate from Al-Azhar University, noted in his festival video.   Farag and the other Young Journalist Award winner Amal Salloum from Syria each received training and equipment up to the value of £10,000 to assist in developing new work.   The festival’s Best Citizen Journalism award went to Syrian documentary maker Wael Kadlo for his short film Wound, about a nurse caring for those injured in Syria’s ongoing civil war.   The Best Short Film award went to Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel for Xenos, following the lives of refugees smuggled from a refugee camp in Lebanon to Greece.   Inspired by the so-called Arab Spring, BBC Arabic and the British Council launched Aan Korb Film and Documentary Festival: Close Up Stories from the New Arab World with screenings, talks, debates and workshops over four days. Aan Korb offered an unprecedented platform to a generation of filmmakers that experienced events and in many cases risked their lives documenting them in the Middle East and North Africa. The festival program included full length films and shorts, fiction and non-fiction, screening the work of professionals alongside citizen journalists armed with the everyday tools of mobile phones, hand-held cameras, social media, to document real, subjective stories.