A moment from director Youssef Chahine’s (top) film Chaos

Cairo has hosted its international film festival 31 times before. But this year is special. For this July, the Egyptian film industry lost its greatest director, its passport to world cinema, Youssef Chahine.

The auteur’s presence, or maybe absence, looms large over this 32nd edition of the Cairo International Film Festival which started on November 18 in the Egyptian capital and will carry on till November 28.

Chahine was his country’s Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa rolled into one. Like Ray, he showed the world a face of Egypt they had never glimpsed before. Like Kurosawa, Chahine put his country’s cinema on the world map right from when his second film Nile Boy (1951) was invited to the Cannes Film Festival. Understanding the importance of being taken seriously by the world, he would be the sole Egyptian representative at the biggest film festivals in the world for the next five decades. Fittingly, he was given the lifetime achievement award at Cannes in 1997.

Interestingly, Chahine was the man who introduced Omar Sharif to the world of movies with his 1954 film The Blazing Sun. Sharif being the honorary president of the Cairo International Film Festival, this 32nd edition is all the more special for the legend of Lawrence of Arabia.

As a tribute to Chahine, the Cairo film festival this year has organised a special tribute to the director by screening three of his films, including his last work Chaos (2007).

At the party hosted by the French Embassy in Cairo on Friday night, all the foreign delegates, from Argentina to China, were discussing Chahine. Before the cocktails flowed, Chahine’s 1958 film Cairo Main Station was shown on the embassy grounds. Just a couple of reels of the black-and-white film about the myriad lives at the station made it clear how Chahine could show so much with so little.

“When you compare the kind of cinema Hollywood was producing in the 1950s, Chahine’s film may come across as technically challenged with shoddy editing and even overtly melodramatic at times but you cannot ignore the importance of his work,” said British film-maker Anthony Sloman, who is on the international jury this year.

“It is because of Chahine and cinema that Egypt made movies and it is because of him that we are having such a fabulous film festival here in Cairo.”