AIWFF & Plan International launch first Cadre School to train girls on arts of cinema

CAIRO – 10 February 2022: The management of the Aswan International Women Film Festival has signed a cooperation agreement with Plan International Egypt to launch the first specialized workshop in southern Egypt to graduate qualified female trainers to work in the applied training workshops for filmmaking for beginners, under the name of “The Cadre School”.

It is a specialized training program for youth, especially girls, launched by the Aswan International Women Film Festival 5 years ago in Aswan.

The cooperation agreement comes in light of the festival and Plan International Egypt's successful experience in the fifth edition, which linked the training program to the girls of Plan International Egypt projects in Assiut. The festival launches the Cadre School as a culmination of its most important training project with Plan International Egypt, expanding the training program to reach girls in all cities of the southern valley.  

The two parties are cooperating to graduate a new generation of female filmmaking trainers in the coming years.

Beginning in July 2022, the project aims to train about 50 girls from the south of the valley to make all kinds of short films that reflect the reality and hopes of a larger section of the youth in the villages of the south, which have suffered from marginalization for decades, leading to the production of a number of films in February 2023. These girls will be prepared through a number of technical workshops to manage small work teams in film projects.

Mohamed Kamal, country director of Plan International Egypt, said that the Cadre School’s workshops extend throughout the year through various media, and is directed to a selected group of talented girls.

The workshops end with collecting all the girls' acquired experiences in a practical workshop for creating cinematic content that they cooperate with their trainers to develop, starting with creating the idea and converting it into an executable visual text (scenario), then filming it and following all the subsequent stages.

Scriptwriter Mohamed Abdel-Khaleq, head of the Aswan Festival, said that heading north was a goal that the festival has been striving for throughout its past five sessions.

Abdel-Khaleq stated that the south altogether has similar problems, adding that they have always suffered because of the influx of hundreds of young people wishing to participate in the festival’s workshops annually, while the festival was unable to include them in direct training programs.

This pattern continued until the partnership took place at the initiative of the Plan Authority, with its long history and well-known experience in building conscious trained generations and having the appropriate regulatory controls and tools for such major human projects.

The journalist Hassan Abu El-Ela, director of the festival, pointed out that the Cadre School project is an important step in advancing the training programs that the festival started five years ago.