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Zawya:
Alternative Films and the Struggle over Space
Since 2004, Misr International Films, the company that was founded by the late Egyptian director Yusif Shahin in 1972, has organized the Panorama of the European Film in Cairo. Over the years, this annual showcase of European cinema has grown immensely, attracting an average of 10,000 admissions in its last edition in 2016. Because of the steady growth of the Panorama, the idea of a permanent venue for alternative film programming in Cairo acquired a flair of feasibility that might have been difficult to imagine otherwise. From that point onwards, Zawya, the first arthouse cinema in Egypt, metamorphosed from an idea in the minds of many cinephiles to a project that opened in downtown Cairo in 2014. If there was a keen interest in European art movies, it followed that an arthouse cinema in Cairo could become a hub for movie lovers, industry professionals and audiences who are typically marginalized by the dictates of the market. The movie distribution and exhibition business is primarily a profit-driven sector that privileges specific types of movies over a wide array of other works which may be perceived as not profitable. Therefore these marginal movies rarely get screened theatrically and their audiences are left to either pirate the movies or give up on the possibility of watching them altogether. Zawya had an immense belief in the existence of an audience for arthouse films, which had previously been overlooked. This was the niche audience to whom Zawya aimed to cater. From the start, Zawya
Youssef Shazli Alia Ayman
was conceived as an initiative that aims for financial sustainability while minimizing compromise on content, rather than being a non-profit or a non-governmental organization. Our aim was, and continues to