Cimatheque – Alternative Film Center in downtown Cairo is a multi-purpose space that offers facilities, training and programming for the independent filmmaking community. Cimatheque believes in the diversity of cinema as an art and hopes to create a space for open discussions, learning and experience exchange between audiences, film practitioners, artists, critics and other specialists. Since its establishment in 2012, Cimatheque has screened more than 300 films from all around the world, many of which were shown in Egypt for the first time. Also, Cimatheque organized more than 20 workshops that hosted more than 250 participants and supported the production of more than 50 films, most of which premiered at large festivals. Cimatheque’s services and programs include a high-end screening hall that presents diverse programs, a moving image archive open to researchers and the public, a Super 8mm and 16mm analog film lab equipped with full-set of analog tools and equipment for filming, developing, and editing, a unique multi-format film scanner and a capacity-building program that offers specialized workshops for young film practitioners. In addition to that, Cimatheque built a post-production facility that provides the highest technology for sound and image editing, color grading, digital film restoration, sound and music recording and mixing. Cimatheque’s archive hosts around 20 000 items of invaluable and diverse material, including a rich collection of rare films, archival footage, and amateur films from the first half of the twentieth century, valuable documents, posters, pamphlets, photographs, reports, specialized rare books in multiple languages, manuscripts, publications, historical letters, personal diaries, and analog equipment. In addition to the unique collection of the film collector Magdy Rafla, the archive includes precious collections of legendary icons in Egyptian film history, including the noted documentarian Atteyat Al Abnoudy, pioneer filmmaker and artist Nagy Shaker, renowned researcher and cinephile Abdel Hamid Said, acclaimed animator Ehab Shaker, amongst many others. The Cimatheque archive seeks to support a growing community of archival-related practitioners and create an interactive critical platform to raise questions about the history of cinema as an industry and art form over the decades.

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