Major

Sat, Sep 6, 2008
4:00 PM

New Museum classroom (directions)

Screening: El Bondera, followed by discussion and Q&A with director Sherif Sadek and Museum as Hub Fellow Ayman Ramadan

Part of Museum as Hub
 
Discussions, Film/Video
El Bondera, a work in progress, takes the lives and livelihood of Cairo’s taxi drivers as its inspiration. Director Sherif Sadek has always been interested in taxi drivers, who interact with the full spectrum of society. Cairo, with 18 million inhabitants, is the largest city in Egypt and the Arab world. In such a city, driving a taxicab would seem like a lucrative trade, ferrying people around all day. Not so, say these drivers, some of whom have been driving for more than twenty years. With a fare meter system that’s broken, paying for a cab ride is a free for all. In Cairo, cab drivers are underappreciated. Urban legends include drivers kidnapping young people, thieves, drug dealers, and more. In this film, Sherif gives a voice to these ubiquitous yet little understood taxicab drivers, highlighting the dysfunction that creates resentment and despair for these individuals.

This program is part of “Museum as Hub: Antikhana,” a project organized by the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo, on view in the fifth-floor Museum as Hub space through September 21, 2008.

Sponsors TOP

The Townhouse Gallery’s participation in the Museum as Hub program is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Mondriaan Foundation.

This discussion is made possible by the Charlotte and Bill Ford Artist Talks Fund.

Museum as Hub is made possible by the Third Millennium Foundation.

Seeds of Tolerance

With additional generous support from Metlife Foundation.

Additional support is provided by the Asian Cultural Council, National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.

Profiles TOP

Sherif Sadek

Cairo-born and New York-based, Sherif Sadek has been has been making short films since 1999. After graduating with a BA in filmmaking from Rochester Institute of Technology, he returned to his native Egypt to work on a documentary film about the nomadic Arab/African tribe of the Bisharin. The Bisharin, who are thought to be the descendants of the Beja tribes of ancient Egyptian fame, extend from the southern borders of Egypt all the way to Somalia, along the Red Sea coast. In late 2001, Sherif returned to New York, working on documentaries on Arab Americans in post-9/11 America, the Iraq War, and Latin gangs in Los Angeles. This is Sherif’s first feature-length documentary film.