6th Alexandria Short Film Festival judging panel revealed

CAIRO - 8 January 2020: The judging panel of the Sixth Alexandria Short Film Festival that will be held form Jan. 26-31has been announced.

The judging panel will be observing the feature and documentary films during the activities of the sixth edition of the festival.

The panel consists of a group of Egyptian and Arab experts, including Egyptian actor Amro Abed, Egyptian editor Heba Othman, film critic Ahmed Shawky, director of the Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam Roche Abdel-Fattah and Tunisian actress Maryam Ferjani.

The judging panel in-depth

Amro Abed: An Egyptian actor and filmmaker. Abed began his cinematic career with costarring in a successful set of films. The films focused on youth, their struggles and fears. He appeared in a cinematic work for the first time in 2006 in the movie “Awqat-Faragh”. A year later, Abed co-starred in the film “Magic”. Abed starred in “Aylet Mekki” in 2010, “Farsh we Ghata” in 2013 and “Leil Khargy” in 2018.

After his cinematic participations, Abed embarked on a successful drama career, landing a role in the series “Abwad el-Khof”, “Ma'a Sabq el-Esrar”, “La Totfe’ el-Shams”, among others.

Heba Othman: An Egyptian editor who graduated from the Higher Cinema Institute. She first worked as an assistant editor in several films, including “Wahed Sefr”, “El-Wa’d”, and “Ramadan Mabrouk Abul Alamain Hamouda”, among others.

Ahmed Shawky: Egyptian film critic, programmer and screenplay supervisor. Shawky has written numerous critic articles since 2009. He publishes weekly articles in the newspaper "Al-Kahera" and the website FilFan. Shawky published six books on Egyptian cinema. Currently, Shawky is the art director of the Cairo International Film Festival, secretary general of the Egyptian Film Critics Association, member of the Board of Directors of the International Federation of Critics (Febrice), among others. Shawky participated as a judging panel member in numerous festivals, including the festivals of Locarno, Malmö, Shanghai, Eurasia, Transylvania, Macau, Tetouan, Oran, Luxor, Tripoli, Rotterdam and Muscat.

Roche Abdel-Fattah: Director and manager of the Arab Film Festival in Holland. He was born in 1982 in Syria. His relationship with the artistic field has started since his childhood, as he was part of a theater group in the city of Hasaka. After moving to the Netherlands in 1999, he pursued his artistic dream, working with Dutch theater groups, where he participated in several plays and art performances. His passion for the audiovisual field made him work with several Dutch and Arab channels since 2001, something that pushed him to enter the artistic academy of Saint-Joest, where he studied audiovisual design engineering in Breda, the Netherlands, and started to produce several short films, and documentaries that were displayed in several countries including Germany, Britain, Russia, Bosnia, China, Qatar and Morocco. Abdel-Fattah joined the Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam since its inception and became the artistic director of the festival in 2011.

Maryam Ferjani: Actress, film director, and Tunisian visual artist. She had her first acting experience in the movie "Layla Bouzid" in 2010, where she was still studying at the Faculty of Medicine in Tunisia. She moved to Italy after that and graduated from the Film Institute Loccino Visconti in Milan, Department of Directing. She also studied acting at the Institute of Theater Paolo Grassi Milano. Ferjani held her first exhibition as a visual artist in Paris in 2016. Ferjani received several international awards including the Critics Award from the Arab Cinema Center.