By: Mai Shaheen
"Rahal", a graduation project Mass Communication department, Radio and Television section at Faculty of Arts, Helwan University, won the best script in Global University Film Awards (GUFA).
It is worthy to note that 1841 films from all over the world and 10 films from Egypt featured in GUFA; "Rahal" scooped the award in the final stage.
The movie starts with the voice over of Ahmed Amin, one of the narrators saying, "I am one of many Egyptian books and this is where I stay. Here, on this desk since I was, fortunately, sold in a good bargain. Every single book, my dear, has wished to be sold in a good bargain ever since it was just a set of blank papers until it was finished and sent to the publisher."
"We worked for 4 months to produce the film from photography, montage and music, as well as trying to reach a number of artists, until we initially settled on the artist Mohamed Henedi, who in turn agreed to be the narrator of the film due to his artistic commitment to filming "Antar Ibn Shaddad," Ahmed Raafat, one of the film makers, told "SEE".
Raafat also added that Amin, who is also the narrator of the famous "Platouh" program, was chosen for our short movie."
He gave an account on how the story of the film came to team's mind saying: "At the beginning, we became friends at the university and the department, and we started to work together on the film through "the graduation project", which required a short film industry. During the final year of the academic year 2016/2017, we started to brainstorm, and "Rahal" was not our first idea, but at last we adopted it and decided to work on its polishing."
"After that the film's sequence became clear and we found that Ahmed was totally cooperative. We were speechless and grateful as the film won the best idea during the graduation projects' discussion of Helwan University." he noted.
The film was shown in several festivals, such as the Cardiff Festival in Britain, where it reached the finals. It was then nominated at Al-Shorouk University, where it won first position at the level of Egyptian universities.
"When we arrived at Hong Kong, the film competed with 1841 films from all over the world as well as 10 films from Egypt. Yara Magdy and Zahra Ashraf were the film's heroes," Raafat added.
It is worthy to mention that the team consisted of 22 actors who sought, through the film, to discuss the neglect of culture and the book in particular. The book was considered as a gift, a picture on Instagram or just décor; there was not any kind of interest in the content itself.
Follow the latest news on Google News
