Jan. 26 – “If you want to build a ship, don’t teach the men to cut wood, divide the tasks and give orders, but rather teach them to long for the vast and endless sea,” wisely said Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The French writer and aviator – father of “The Little Prince” – described nostalgia like this. Many writers, philosophers, intellectuals, and poets try to describe it. Nostalgia is homesickness, the unfulfilled desire of return to a home or a place, but above all, it’s the impossible desire to return to a specific time and situation. Even cinema talks about nostalgia and now a film festival promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute in Cairo (in partnership with the Netherlands-Flemish Institute) tackles the theme of nostalgia. The film retrospective will be presented at the theater. The show kicked off on January 15 and will end on February 26. All films are subtitled in English, and are followed by a conference of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo, near the IIC. The next film that will be screened – on Thursday, January 29 at 7:30pm – is “Viaggio in Italia” by Roberto Rossellini, starring George Sanders, Ingrid Bergman, Leslie Daniels, Anna Proclemer, and Paul Müller.
