For this 44th edition of the Cairo International Festival, the festival management has chosen to honor several artists, including the Egyptian star Lebleba, who this year won the Golden Pyramid for his entire career. The trophy was given to him during the opening ceremony, which also coincided with the date of his birthday!
With each edition of each film festival, artists are honored. We bring them on stage, we give them trophies, we talk about their career. It is very good, at the same time, we do the show, we entertain the public and we please the artist (when we think of honoring him during his lifetime!). But what are these tributes for?
When they are well organized, these tributes are also a way of writing the history of cinema and also to create links between the generations of filmmakers and spectators.
In recent years, the CIFF has organized these tributes very well. It usually starts during the opening ceremony of the edition, where the artist Honoré goes up on stage and receives his trophy, often after the projection of a video which retraces his journey. Thereafter, a meeting between this honored artist and the public is always organized.
For this 44th Edition of the Cairo International Festival, the festival management has chosen to honor several artists, including the Egyptian star Lebleba, who this year won the Golden Pyramid for his entire career. The trophy was given to him during the opening ceremony, which also coincided with the date of his birthday!
The next day, Lebleba met his audience, who came to listen to him and applaud him in very large numbers.
Lebleba expressed his joy at being honored with this 44th edition of the Cairo International Film Festival, after her long career in cinema, television and spectacle, started when she was a small child.
She told her artistic beginnings, and how she discovered her talent. In reality, it was his family who encouraged him to enter the world of art, after having seen her imitate his loved ones at home. From the age of 3, she got into the house to imitate all her relatives and all their guests. She did it very well and in a very funny way. She also told the first meeting between her and the writer and screenwriter Abu al-Saud al-Ibiari and the director Niazi Mustafa, who played an important role in her artistic career.
Lebleba also told a few anecdotes from his long career. For example, when she was still a child, Anwar Wagdy, disguised, went to see her in one of the theaters in which she worked in Alexandria, and asked to see her through director Hassan al-Saifi, so that she shares her first cinematographic work with him.
Lebleba confirmed that she has worked with many directors throughout her artistic career, such as Atef El Tayeb, Samir Seif, Mohamed Abdel Aziz, Youssef Chahine, and others, and that she learned a lot of them, which helped her in his work.
Hussein Fahmy, explained that the festival steering committee had unanimously decided to honor Lebleba, for her very long very rich career, and that she deserves this celebration.
Several artists were present at this meeting, including actress Elham Chahin, who thanked the direction of the Cairo Film Festival for having chosen to honor the Star Lebleba, saying that she is the most honest and straight artist in the artistic milieu, and actress Laila Elwi, who recalled that her friend Lebleba has always passed her work first, just after her deceased mother. As for actor Mahmoud Hamida, he asked that the story of the artist Lebleba be recorded in the “Guinness” encyclopedia, because she is an artist who has no equal in the world. She may indeed be the only artist to have started her career when she was a child, and to have stayed in this artistic environment to this day.
Neïla Driss
