Luxor African Film Festival (LAFF) launches the FACTORY project
to support female directors in Africa and the Middle East.
March 2022
The creative bright side of long documentary production: owning the diversity of concepts and cinematographic beauty is becoming more and more wider and effective.
In addition to that, it competes with the creativity and artistic styles of the long fictions, while documentaries tackle true sensitive daily life stories, they are less in numbers and beyond less in budgets in comparison to long fictions.
On the other hand, fictions and documentaries receive almost equal attention in major film festivals like Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Sundance, however female documentary filmmakers tend to face more difficulties and obstacles in comparison to their male equivalent.
The Luxor African Film Festival (LAFF) is launching a new project entitled FACTORY Initiative during its eleventh edition taking place 4-10 March 2022.
The Initiative will be supporting female directors from Africa and the Middle East as LAFF administration knows the importance of shedding the lights on them and their roles in creating films in our region (specially documentaries) where they face lot of challenges finalize their first or second film.
Therefore, LAFF will be supporting 11 long films, as well as developing, training, and supporting psychologically these young female directors, by benefiting from the experiences of 5 established filmmakers participating in the project and inviting a number of experts from Europe and USA in order to enhance a sense of safety and confidence through workshops specially prepared for the Factory to develop projects from Africa and MENA region.
As the Factory founder will create a platform where all participants will have the opportunity to exchange experience a group of leading women directors in documentary cinema to host discussions, along with film screenings directed by leading African female documentary filmmakers.
The participants in FACTORY projects selected by the Festival management and the Factory director, Kawthar Younis, an Egyptian director who studied filmmaking at the Cairo Higher Film Institute. Her most prominent long documentary debut" A Gift from the Past" was widely praised by critics in various local and international film festivals. Kawthar currently produces and directs, short and long films, in addition TV commercials. She is one of the founders of the RAWEYAT (SHE-NARRATORS),
LAFF is organized by the Independent Shabab Foundation under the auspices of the Egyptian Ministries of Culture, Tourism and Foreign Affairs, with the National Bank of Egypt and other partners.
