A few days after the selection of Mohamed Diab's Clash to represent Egypt at the 2017 Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category, the film was selected to compete in the official competition of the 60th British Film Institute (BFI) London Film Festival that this year will run between 5 and 16 October, according to a Saturday press release by MAD Solutions, a local film marketing and PR company.
Produced in 2016, the film, directed by Mohamed Diab and written by Mohamed and Khaled Diab, explores the confrontations between pro and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators that took place in the days following the ouster of president Mohamed Morsi on 3 July 2013.
The film was chosen to open the 69th Cannes Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, and it was released in Egyptian cinemas in July.
The film opens in a theatrical manner, where we see an empty police truck ready to host the actors: two journalists, several army supporters, Islamist protesters, and a police conscript.
"Starring Nelly Karim, alongside Tarek Abd El-Aziz, Hany Adel, Ahmed Malek, Ashraf Hamdi, Mohamed Abdel Azim, and Gamil Barsoum, as well as others, the casting will distinguish the film in the coming years. The characters are well studied and their limits, fears, and hopes can easily be extracted and delivered to the viewers. Many in the twenty-plus characters gave an astonishing performance, propping the realism in the film."
Diab wrote the scripts of several well-known Egyptian films, including El-Gezira 1 and 2 (2007 and 2014) and Decor (2014), among others.
His directorial debut came with Cairo 6,7,8 (2010), starring Bushra, Nelly Karim and Maged El-Kedwany.
Run by the British Film Institute (BFI), the 12-day festival will this year screen “a total of 193 fiction and 52 documentary features, including 18 World Premieres, 8 International Premieres, 39 European Premieres. There will also be screenings of 144 short films, including documentary, live action and animated works,” according to the festival's official website.
