I was not raised in a cinephile environment, but I shared an interest in film and television with my sister from an early age. My parents keep a series of slides in the family collection that is a wonderfully accurate representation of the comfortable viewing pleasures of our suburban childhood. It shows my mother, my sister and I cuddled up on the couch in the living room. We were aged seven and nine respectively and completely immersed in THE SOUND OF MUSIC (USA: Robert Wise, 1965). Our cheeks are flushed with excitement, eyes wide open from a mix of fascination and fatigue. We must have repeated this ritual over forty times, knowing the lyrics by heart and having developed a habit of fastforwarding through the parts we, at the time, considered boring. The love for cinema did not diminish, however, at the end of our childhoods. On the contrary, as adolescents we would often persuade our father on weekends to drive us to the out-of-the-way video store. We preferred to watch the tapes twice; within the family setting at night and, again, just the two of us the next morning, before returning them to the store. Our shared interest evolved from browsing the video –store's popular entertainment shelves to a passion for discovering “other cinemas,” in the mid-1990s. We were the first among our family and circle of friends to visit art houses and the “better” cinemas. Gus van Sant's My OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (USA: 1991) and Jane Campion's THE PIANO (Australia/ New Zealand/France: 1993) come to mind as particularly strong revelations during that period, which left us yearning for more. This craving for “other” films was satisfied, above all, when we began visiting the international film festival in our hometown of Rotterdam.

My first memory of the festival is the feeling of being pleasantly overwhelmed by the many unknown cinematic forms, the intelligent, unconventional stories, and the exotic cultures of which the films allowed us a glimpse. I remember watching my first Egyptian film at the festival. At the time, I experienced it as an absolutely incomprehensible story filled with ghosts, illogical superstition and characters with extravagant, unfamiliar acting styles.