Mariam Abdel-Rahman is a young visual artist who graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in 2013, but now she has also become a graduate of the Jesuit Cairo Animation School (JCAS). The name of the school was not familiar to Mariam in 2014 when she heard about it for the first time from her friend Ibrahim Saad, a fellow artist and cofounder of the school. On her first visit she did not imagine that she would be able to produce her first animation film within one year. The Memorial has actually participated in several film festivals including the official competition of the Animania Festival in Pilsen, Czech Republic in November 2016, where the Jesuit Cairo Animation School (JCAS) received the jury award for its efforts in promoting animation art education and production in Egypt. Mariam is currently the administrative coordinator of the school, reflecting the school policy to encourage graduates to be involved in activities and services not only to transfer their skills and experiences to the new students but also to improve their own practices and to seek more chances in the field of animation filmmaking.
“This experience changed my life,” Mariam says. “It is not about animation but more about an education method that helps the artist to turn her ideas into creative art work no matter how or what. I wish I had the same chance during my faculty studies. We now have an open source of knowledge on the internet so we find out that the way art is being taught is totally different from what we have in our faculty. It is not only about a frame and oil painrs. You can move your art. Here I met much academic expertise in every field, music, cinema, photography, and every aspect of filmmaking. Some of them were my professors in the faculty. It is not that we have better resources, but the method of teaching is different…”
Marwa Abdel-Moneim is another graduate of the JCAS and she is now in charge of the children's animation workshops. Marwa had participated in many painting exhibitions after graduating from the Art Education Faculty in 2008, but animation remained a magic dream that she had never found the right place or time to pursue.
“After my graduation,” she recalls, “I made two animated clips on my computer at home using my own paintings; I spent many hours on the internet reading about how to move my paintings. I created everything with my limited resources but after that I did not know where to go for a real education, so I continued browsing the internet for material and reading.” In her first animation film after one year at the JCAS, Plastic Clouds, Marwa made real plastic puppets to dance in the painted woods. “My challenge was to give life to the objects, any objects, and I did it with puppets.” In her film Marwa was also able to write her own script and to create her own sound effects in addition to the visual side. “Compared to live action films, animation is not an easy art so one should have a strong passion to endure the long hours of hard work. Actually we were spending all our weekdays in the school though it was only three days of study. The rest of the week we come here to practice and to work on our projects. With only one camera we needed to cooperate and to divide its use fairly among all the students. It was hard work but very fruitful.” Mariam, Marwa and seven more students are the first graduates of the JCAS, the first of its kind school in Egypt, which specialises in animation and applied non-formal educational methods, teaching its students for free. The students of the school have to be university graduates with drawing skills but they don't have to have any previous experience in animation. For one year they study 18 subjects that cover different aspects of animation filmmaking. After four months they are also obliged to give some hours during the week to deliver their knowledge to others taking animation classes: children, teens, people with special needs animation classes.
Ibrahim Saad, the current director of the JCAS, believes this style of transferring knowledge from one student to another is very important for avoiding the mistakes of the past: “The reason the art of animation has not developed in Egypt even though we made our first short animation in 1936 is not only the nature of the education system and the lack of resources but the fact that we have not had well trained cadres even when we did have pioneers who made a unique initiative in the field. The result is that after over a century late Egypt still has not produced a single long animation.” In the 1930s Egypt became one of the first countries in the Arab region to produce an animation short, by the Frenkel brothers (Herschel, David and Shlomo), Egyptian Jews of Russian origins. They created Egypt's answer to Mickey Mouse, Meshmesh Effendi; starring in a series of short films tackling social and national issues in the period 1936-1947, he was widely admired by the press and the media. In 1951 the Frankel brothers established Frenkel Animated Pictures, the first animation studio in Egypt, but they had to leave Egypt at the end of the 1950s for political reasons, and their departure put an end to the first animation production initiative in the country. A few years later the Mohib brothers (Ali and Hossam) produced a few low-budget short films before taking charge of the animation department in the newly established Egyptian television, as of 1961.
The main obstacle facing the Mohib brothers was the lack of trained artists, which forced them to do their best to train some of those who would later become animation professors at the Higher Film Institute and the Faculty of Fine Arts. In 1962 the Mohib brothers made The White Line, their first long film which, produced by Egyptian Television, was a mix of live action and animation techniques. After the 1967 war a shift in the production policy led to the Mohib brothers' resignation. They established their own animation Mohib Studio through which they imported some of the most advanced cameras of their time. Ali Mohib and later Ahmed Saad were the most influential figures in animation production until the 1980s, though most of their work remained limited to advertising and propaganda with a few short films, animated serials and songs.
In addition to a few, random courses at cultural centres, the oldest established academic institutes that teach animation in Egypt are the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Film Institute. According to Ibrahim Saad, “The year I graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts there were more than 250 animation students, but now there are fewer than 17 students in the department which means it has become less attractive to study animation. If the graduates do not know how to make a living out of their studies or how to turn their studies into works of art the number will keep dwindling to zero. Out of four graduates of the animation department at the Film Institute, what is more, only one was able to produce an animation film for his graduation project.”
Part of the problem according to Saad is that the education system in these institutions is out of touch with developments in the field of animation filmmaking around the world. On the other hand, the mentality is that animation is not a cinematic art but a kind of gimmick used to make ads or educational material more attractive. “On the practical and the academic level they do not see animation production as an industry, that is if they see at it at all, so graduates can only imagine being advertising company employees, not filmmakers.” But the idea for the JCAS did not emerge from a needs assessment plan but rather from Ibrahim and his colleagues' experience at the Jesuits Cultural Centre five years ago when they attended animation workshops with the American artist Alexandra Zevin.
“When Zevin left Egypt, those who attended the workshops were eager to gain more knowledge and practice. I was a part of what Zevin was doing and we started to think what should come next. How could we respond to this passion.” The decision was to conduct a series of workshops where visual artists and filmmakers were invited to meet the students and to exchange experiences. They also organised many animation film screenings: “Screenings were an important part of what we were doing because they helped us to recognise what we were aspiring to. We found out that we are closer to the new trends of animation filmmaking in Latin America and Eastern Europe where several groups of animation filmmakers and studios cooperate to produce low-budget animation movies and this is what we are looking for. We got to a point when we had enthusiastic students and a concept to build their learning experience on, so why not dig deeper? That is how the project was born.” The Jesuits Cultural Centre was ready to support the project since part of its vision is to create an alternative space for art education that serves mainly young people, children and vulnerable groups in marginalised areas. It already has two successful and established projects: a film school and a social theatre school, in addition to a street theatre group that works with children and young people. “And because of the success of theatre and film schools,” Ibrahim explains, “the administration of Cairo Jesuits was convinced that to start a new school for animation is a step forward. They approved the project and provided us with a small space for a studio, a camera, an editing unit and a few computers.”
The first real challenge was to create a curriculum enabling the students to learn how to make an animation film from scratch. “We met with and contacted many experts in the field including professors at academic institutions in Egypt and in Europe. We also made connections with animation filmmaking groups in Latin America, Russia, the UK and Eastern Europe who had been eye openers for us. The result is a curriculum that consists of 18 subjects covering all aspects of animation filmmaking including film production.” Still, the most important part of the curriculum is the method of teaching: “What we are using here is an interactive way of teaching. We teach the students how to watch films, how to conduct their research and how to build their own film lists. We teach them how to think of alternative ways to reach their targets, how to be creative when it comes to limited resources and materials. We teach them also how to create their own sound tracks and sound effects. And we ask animation filmmakers in different academic institutions and independent groups around the world to send us the making of their films so we can study them with our students. That is how we can improve our skills and techniques.”
In its first year the animation school had no budget beyond what was provided by the Jesuits. All the teachers team were volunteers: “We targeted those who are not only artists but also have the ability and the skill to deal with young people, who are fixable enough with our teaching methods. All of the teaching team are among the most professional in their fields: directors, screenwriters, editors, cinematographers, producers, visual artists, composers and graphic designers. All wanted to contribute to the new project.” And behind this enthusiasm was more than the desire to lend a hand in establishing another training space. It was a general understanding that there is a big gap in the animation film industry throughout the Arab region. “The animation film industry is very expensive in terms of time and money. It needs huge teamwork by visual artists and filmmakers, and huge money for the programmes and equipment which is very expensive; it takes many months to produce one short film. But even if all of these elements are available, still, well trained artists remain the most important factor and this is the missing element in the history of animation in Egypt where there were few honest individual initiatives but no human resources to build on their efforts. We need to change this state of affairs.”
Changing the position of animation on the Egyptian art map is another objective of the school, according to Ibrahim: “What we are trying to do is to change the culture of how people see animation. We are not only helping young people to create their own art but we are also making efforts to enable children and teens to understand how they can play and express themselves with animation. It is a form of expression like live action films or theatre or painting. It is not only a commercial tool. And for this reason most of the lectures and educational materials of the JCAS are video recorded and made available online. We want everyone to have access to our lectures and art works, and to start their own initiative. We wish to follow the model of Latin America where a group of filmmakers or students collaborate to make one film. They meet and plan together, they work separately and at the end of the project they collect all the parts together in one film. Art can only develop when it is practised at the public level and not confined to academic institutions. We are not sure that we are able to solve the problem of limited resources but at least we are trying to get closer and to be ready for future changes.”
One such “future change” for the JCAS is that it received a one-year grant from the European Union to resume its efforts in art education. The grant will enable the school to enrol more students and to have more stable resources for the next academic year. “We teach our students several animation programmes (2D, stop motion, and cutout) and this year I hope we'll able to add 3D Max, which is very expensive and we could not afford a teacher in the first year.” Although 3D Max was missing, the six graduation projects of the first class have facilitated many activities and screening during 2016: at the Film Institute's Sphinx International Film Festival, at the French Institute in Alexandria and Cairo, at the Goethe Institute Cairoa and at the Florida Art Space in Munich, Germany. The Jesuits animation team was also invited to make more than 45 minutes of animation with children at Mini-Munchkin 2016 in Germany. JCAS also participated in the seventh Student Films Festival at St Joseph University in Beirut, Lebanon in December 2016. A protocol of cooperation between the JCAS and the ADEF Foundation for Youth and Children's Art Education was also conducted.
What Ibrahim Saad is looking forward to is for the JCAS to be able to organise an international festival of animation films in Egypt. “When this happens I hope we will have our first Egyptian long animation. This could not happen through the efforts of JCAS alone but with cooperation from all the animation academic and production institutes in Egypt. It is a big dream that should come true. If we could not solve our everyday problems in reality we can at least solve them through cinema, through animation, through art. Art is a source of inspiration.”
Mariam and Marwa's dream, on the other hand, is to be able to use animation to discuss Egyptian history, culture and civilisation: “We have many stories to tell,” Mariam says. “And we need to look inside our reality, our culture and civilisation to find more.” As for Marwa, she dreams of academic institutions in Egypt revising their educational systems: “They have to change their way of teaching. And until then I'm persuading all the students I can to start their real learning journey after graduation because what they learn in their schools and universities is not enough to realise their dreams or even to develop dreams good enough for the future…”
