In these pages you will hopefully find interesting tips on how to take advantage of Cairo's many cultural opportunities, with particular attention to live events. Cairo Live Events Guide does not pretend to be exhaustive but will try to cover main events open to the public.

This is a private, independent, nonprofit endeavour. This blog was started in August 2008 by Cairowanderer who has been running it solo up to May 2011. Since then Cairene Beat contributes as well to the blog. If you have any comment, tip, or information you think might be relevant for the blog, please write to cairowanderer@gmail.com or cairenebeat@gmail.com.

Read about Cairo Live Events Guide on The Daily News Egypt

Friday, August 5, 2011

Ramadan Film Festival at Darb 17 18

Darb 1718 will present a Ramadan Film Festival at their open air theater, Cinema El-Fourn, showing films every Monday and Wednesday starting Monday August 8, 2011 to Wednesday August 24, 2011.

Films begin at 9:0010:00 PM (update). Arrive around 8.30 PM to get best seats.
All films will be subtitled in English.
Tickets are for L.E. 10.


Monday August 8, 2011

Delicatessen (1991) - France, Dir: Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Delicatessen is a unique and surreal dark comedy that received overwhelming critical acclaim. In a post-apocalyptic society where meat is scarce, cannibalism is no longer unsavory. And when a young ex-clown takes a job in a dilapidated deli, he's completely unaware that the butcher plans to serve him to the building's bizarre tenants. But when the butcher's nearsighted daughter falls for the clown, she'll go to absurd lengths to foil her father's plan. Delicatessen springs from a unique wellspring of imagination and inspiration, and it's handled with such visual virtuosity that you can't help but be mesmerized. A priceless comedy, so inventive that you may feel the urge to stand up and cheer.


Wednesday August 10, 2011

Lost in La Mancha (2002) – UK, Dir: Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe

A tantalizing memorial to what could have been that comes right from the very heart of the action, the hugely acclaimed Lost in La Mancha offers a frank, often hilarious and frequently painful account of some of the disasters, natural and otherwise, that befell director Terry Gilliam’s attempt to film The Man who Killed Don Quixote.
Because Terry Gilliam is unquestionably one of the great film directors of our time, Lost in La Mancha, a documentary that captures the collapse of his attempt to make a movie out of Don Quixote, makes for fascinating but painful viewing. Dogged by a reputation for being wasteful and out-of-control, Gilliam had to fight to gather the funding for the project, but the assembled cast (including French actor Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp) and the fantastic design elements promised something glorious. Then jets flying overhead, flash floods, and the ill health of a lead actor completely sideswiped the already delicate production. The increasing stress and unhappiness of the filmmakers is gripping, but what truly tantalizes are the few bits of film that Gilliam managed to shoot--only two or three minutes of screen time, but enough to suggest a magnificent vision.


Monday August 15, 2011

Funny Games (1997) – Austria, Dir: Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke’s controversial thriller watches an affluent couple, their child and dog as they arrive at their lakeside vacation home. Settling into their holiday routine, the family is visited by a pair of clean-cut young men in tennis whites and gloves, who inexplicably turn ruthless and brutal, forcing the family into playing their “funny games.” Haneke then plays his own games, turning the audience into an active participant and radically shifting the film’s narrative.
* Mature audiences only (thriller)

Wednesday August 17, 2011

Following (1998) - UK, Dir: Christopher Nolan

An unemployed aspiring "writer" Bill (Jeremy Theobald) has a peculiar hobby: shadowing strangers at random in the streets of London. When Cobb (Alex Haw), a man Bill has been following, catches him in the act, Bill is drawn into Cobb's world of breaking into flats and prying into the personal lives of their victims. In Bob, Bill finds a strange companion - part mentor, part confessor and part evil twin. With an ingenious structure that involves flash forwards and doubling back, the film tests our knowledge and understanding just as the protagonist is being duped into an elaborate triple-cross. Following is the independently-produced, feature debut of director Christopher Nolan, who would go on to develop his innovative style in films like Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception.

Monday August 22, 2011

Boy (2010) - New Zealand, Dir: Taika Waititi

It's 1984, and Michael Jackson is king - even in Waihau Bay, New Zealand. Here we meet Boy, an 11-year-old who lives on a farm with his gran, a goat called Leaf, his younger brother, Rocky (who thinks he has super powers) and several cousins. Shortly after Gran leaves for a Tangihanga in Wellington for a week, Boy's father, Alamein, appears out of the blue. Having imagined a heroic version of his father during his absence, Boy comes face to face with the real version - an incompetent hoodlum who has returned to find a bag of money he buried years before.

Wednesday August 24, 2011

Wall (2004) – USA, Dir: Simone Bitton

Wall is a cinematic meditation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the filmmaker blurs the lines of hatred by asserting her double identity as Jew and Arab. In an original documentary approach, the film follows the separation fence that is destroying one of the most historically significant landscapes in the world, while imprisoning one people and enclosing the other. On the building site of this wall, daily utterances and holy chants, in Hebrew and in Arabic, defy the discourses of war, passing through the deafening noise of bulldozers. Wall offers its spectators a last glimpse of the beauty of this land and the humanity of its inhabitants a moment before they disappear behind the wall.

For suggestions and feedback contact cinema@darb1718.com.

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