Cairo Film Connection Jury

Osama Fawzy

Osama Fawzy was born in1961 in Cairo, Egypt. In 1984 he graduated from The High Institute of Cinema and went on to work as an assistant director until 1987. During this time he worked with renowned directors such as Hussein Kamal, Niazi Mostafa, Barakat and Ashraf Fahmy. Fawzy produced Sherif Arafa’s film The Dwarfs are coming and later worked with two important directors; Yousry Nasrallah on Mercedes and Radwan El Kashef on Why Violets.

Despite having only directed four films, Osama Fawzy is considered one of the most important Egyptian filmmakers. His first film was Asphalt Demons, produced in 1995. In 1991 came The Demon’s Paradise, an adaptation of a work by Brazilian writer Jorge Amado. In 2004 he produced I Love Cinema and his most recent film, Natural Colors, was released in 2009.
Osama Fawzy has won a lot of important prizes in local, regional and international film festivals. He was awarded the Jury Special Prize at Locarno Film Festival for his film Asphalt Demons, and won The Golden Prize for The Demons Paradise at Damascus Film Festival and Khouribga Film Festival for African Cinema in Morocco. The film also received a special honour at the Arab World Institute Biennale in Paris.

Karima Kamal

Karima Kamal graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Chicago University in 1982. Her diverse career within the media has included acting as director of department for Arab Radio and Television, where she produced and presented her program Fifty Minutes. She has developed content for a number of documentaries for Egyptian and foreign organisations. Kamal has a weekly column in Al Masry al-Youm newspaper, where she is head of the social investigations department. She has previously worked for Sabah el Kheir magazine with a fixed column entitled Unusual and was a consultant for Al Badeel newspaper, where she had the daily column: Egypt, which was absent. She has furthermore written a number of books, the most recent of which is Personal Status of the Copts (2012), and has won the Mustafa Amine Award in Journalism. Kamal has participated in a wide variety of international conferences and events in Egypt and abroad, as well as several workshops - including one on freedom of opinion and expression in Paris, 2008. Kamal is significantly interested in women’s rights and was a member of the Committee of the Dialogue Forum on the Convention of Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women and is currently a member of the National Council of Women in its new post-revolution lineup.

Jacqueline Ada

French producer Jacqueline Ada is head of the cooperation department at the CNC (National Centre of Cinematography) and in charge of Aide aux Cinémas du Monde (Aid for World Cinema). Over the past decade, she has worked as a jury member on the panel of numerous film competitions across the Mediterranean: Locarno, San Sébastian Festival, Montpellier, Carthage and Thessalonique.

David Somerset

Somerset is an Educational Programmer / Curator at the BFI Southbank in London. He has delivered cultural film seasons and special events over the last decade, working closely with the community to curate relevant and authentic content in both fiction and documentary. The strand African Odysseys has radically changed the face of African film appreciation in London, reaching out for the first time to local African diaspora audiences, rather than just film students and academics, in an innovative strand of contextualised screenings of some of the best in African and African Diaspora cinema. Other programmes include Chinese film seasons and events as well as South Asian and Arab programming. Prior to working at the BFI, Somerset was a teacher of script writing at Birkbeck College in London and a script reader. He continues to write about and occasionally make films.

Souad Houssein

Born in Djibouti, Souad Houssein, has 13 years of experience in the field of cinema as a programme specialist for the Organisation International de la Francophonie (OIF) and is also in charge of cinema at the Direction of French Language and Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (Direction de la Langue Française et de la Diversité Culturelle et Linguistique).

Houssein’s responsibilities include managing the Francophone Southern Audiovisual Production fund, which offers grants to support projects in 38 developing countries as well as the promotion of films backed by the OIF .

She is currently developing a panafrican fund for cinema and audiovisual production in partnership with UNESCO and the Federation of Panafrican Cinema (La Federation Panafricaine des Cinéates), with the support of the The National House of Tunisian Producers (Chambre Nationale des Producteurs Tunisiens)