Published: 24-Oct-2003
By: Rory Peck Trust     

Although the entries for this year’s Rory Peck Awards reflect the Iraq war, these awards prove once again that it is the freelancers who, with courage and passionate involvement, are committed to recording ongoing conflicts and issues around the world.     

 

The Sony International Impact Award

 

Ibrahim El Batout "Mass Graves in Iraq"

 

This footage shows the discovery of the mass graves in Iraq and the efforts of relatives to identify the victims.

In his pictures, Ibrahim El Batout has not only captured the terror of the Saddam regime, but also the grief and hope of the relatives of the missing family members as they search for any remains of their loved ones.

 

Ibrahim El Batout's comments:

"When we shot this documentary it was relatively safe. For me it was a deja-vu of other mass graves I filmed before in Guatemala, Bosnia and Kosovo.

So it enhanced my idea about war where blood always looked red and bones always had the same colours, structures and smell, where suffering made no distinction of its victims age, colour, religion or ethnic background."

By Ali Jaafar

Hailing from a news and documentary background, Egyptian helmer el-Batout's first two features, "Ithaki" and this year's "Eye of the Sun," have been notable for their often stunning visuals and weaving narratives. "Eye of the Sun" was honored at this year's Taormina Film Festival, a testament to the quality of a film which effortlessly journeys from Baghdad -- with real-life footage shot by el-Batout on location -- to an impoverished Cairo neighborhood. El-Batout is prepping his next -- and biggest-budget -- feature, an adaptation of Essam Youssef's controversial novel "Quarter Gram," about a gang of Egyptian junkies.

 

By Mariam Elias

His films have been described by most critics and viewers as unanticipated, not only compared to commercial cinema, but even among the underground and impendent filmmakers. As a witness and a documenter of traumatic human experiences including 12 epic wars, his ideas and themes are based on a real exposure to brass tacks. A well-grounded artist, a social critic, like a chameleon he has been able to use his skills and resources to create documentary, fiction and feature movies.

For the past twenty years, director Ibrahim El Batout has documented the most momentous international events of transgression and loss such as the war in Iraq, Kosovo, Somalia, the first gulf war, the Iran-Iraq war and Czshachescow's downfall in Romania. His films reveal the veiled issues that most countries try to hide in an exclusive documentary for the Al -Jazeera channel he captured the Sudanese refugee atrocity that took place in Mohandessin district in Cairo. Other striking documentaries touched on drug addiction in Kuwait and female circumcision in Ethiopia.

His work has won several international awards and honors, including ECHO, the Axel Springer Award in Germany and most recently the Roy Peck award for a three-minute documentary entitled Mass Graves in Iraq. Unquestionably, El Batout's documentary films are not only significant because of their compelling subject matter, but also because of the mind behind those films- a director who has mastered film technique to capture reality in moving artistic images. "We are creatures who love telling stories; the formula is to be simple and clear. Art is not ambiguous and far-fetched. It has the ability to speak to variety" El Batout said, explaining his methodology (Scheme).

Profile By : Yassmin El-Rashidi

As the United States launched its first military strikes against Iraq earlier this year television viewers around the world avidly consumed images of Baghdad, pictures of US troops storming a city the inhabitants of which were once again hostage to upheavals and the unknown.

The 19-day war was shorter than had been expected -- Baghdad fell on 9 April. Interest by viewers around the world initially soared -- everyone, so it seemed, was waiting and watching. But as the statue of Saddam toppled, so the steadfast daily interest waned. Like many wars in the last two decades the situation, albeit officially "over", began to drag on and the political chaos no longer made sense. In this case -- and it is hardly unique -- the turmoil will last for years to come. Most people move on, skimming the news headlines with an acquired detachment. For a few, however, the situation intensifies.

 

By Joseph Fahim
First Published: August 31, 2007

 

A couple of years ago, a little independent Egyptian film called "Ithaki" was screened at the Sawy Culture Wheel in front of a curious audience unfamiliar with its director. As the captivating images continued to roll one after another, an eerie silence pervaded the screening venue.

Based on a poem by the Greek Alexandrian poet Cavafy, the 70-minute film revolves around a war cameraman composing a film about 15 different characters.

The plotless film is a combination of documentary footage with recreated scenes set in Cairo. The thin line between fantasy and reality blurs in a series of sad, mystical images accompanied by a haunting score hummed by singer Karima Nite.

By May El Naggar

 

"El Batout drills into drawing connections between people and their different situations; they could superficially seem distant and unrelated, but he subtly directs our attention to the ties between them through his use of the storytelling technique and through highlighting the similarities in their lives. The war in a neighboring country in the middle east is now nothing more than a news story to us; a news story that we are slowly growing detached from. The film reflects on the suffering of Iraqis, of Egyptians, and even on the suffering of Christ, the story of which is told for multi-purposes in the film. This creates insight and a unified human experience of people wherever they are; it doesn't matter if they live in Iraq or Ein Shams. The relatively impoverished Cairene district.Slowly,the detachment diminishes and the connection is remade.