The 31st edition of the Carthage Film Festival was launched despite the exceptional circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Six Tunisian and African short films paying tribute to the Tunisian and African cinema will inaugurate the festival that runs from the 18th to the 23rd of December. This will mark the first time that the inauguration of one of Africa and the Arab world’s most prestigious festivals does not feature major productions.
General Manager of the Carthage Festival Reda El-Bahi stressed that this would be the “challenge edition” and considered that refusing to cancel this year’s editions despite the pandemic is “a victory for cinema that avenges the culture of life.”
The festival is inviting its fans to watch the movies in their cars. Drive-in cinema, a model that was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the United States, has made a comeback with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic after movie theaters closed.
The festival will screen 31 drive-in cinemas in the center of the Tunisian capital which can accommodate 300 cars, throughout the days of the festival, at a rate of one film per day.
Tunisian director Ibrahim Al-Latif, the festival’s artistic director, said: “With modest capacity and the help of several national institutions we were able to collect more than 10 percent of the Carthage Film Festival’s (which first began in 1966) extended archive, adding that they “hope that those who will succeed us will build on what we started in order to preserve the Tunisian and Arab cinematic memory and prevent it from disappearing.”
