Cairo's First International Film Festival: African-Asian Solidarity, Modernity and Counter-Cultural Projects in the Age of Nasser.

Abstract

The second edition of the Afro-Asian Film Festival (AAFF) took place in Cairo in 1960. It was organized by the ministry of culture in the framework of the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) and was the first international film festival to ever happen in Cairo. This thesis is based on archival research examining magazines, daily newspapers, biographies and films, engaging with historical possibilities that this festival offers in the present.

Gamal Abdel Nasser’s domestic and foreign policies placed Cairo at the center of both the Arab and the African-Asian sphere. I first demonstrate as my main thesis that the AAFF offered a space for two ideologies, pan-Arabism and African-Asian anti-colonial solidarity, to overlap within the framework of the AAFF. Second, by taking two films screened at the AAFF as case studies, I demonstrate how gender was used particularly in Egyptian cinema for the advancement of nationalism and of a modernity that would represent Cairo as a progressive nation-state. Third, I turn towards the negative press reviews around the festival revealing that the first international film festival to be held in Cairo was expected to compete with film festivals globally and showing a clear aspiration for modernity and progress in 1960s Nasserist Cairo, that the AAFF failed to achieve. Fourth and finally, I demonstrate connections between the Cairo AAFF and the African-Asian anti-colonial movement more broadly, tracing the historical trajectory of cinema and culture in an era of anti-imperialist struggle. I argue that the AAFF laid the foundations for the later emergence of cultural resistance beyond Africa and Asia, namely Third Cinema.

My main conclusion is that despite the limitations imposed by a state-sponsored event, Egypt through Nasserism enabled a space for African-Asian cultural enactment of anticolonialism and Third World solidarity. The historical tracing of cinema and culture in an era of anti-imperialist struggle demonstrates how the AAFF allowed for the emergence of counter-cultural projects. This film festival opens up questions and possibilities about history, about knowledge production and about memory.