A press conference was held on Wednesday at the Misr Public Library in Damanhour to discuss the first Damanhour International Festival of Women’s Caricature.
The Egyptian Public Library organizes the festival in collaboration with the Abdullah Al-Sawy Foundation, the Goethe Institute, the French Institute, the Damanhour Opera, and the Beheira Branch of the National Council for Women. It aims to preserve the Egyptian cartoon heritage and will run from March 3 to March 7 next year.
The festival will feature several countries, led by France, as the festival’s guest of honor during its first session. The conference discussed the details of the festival and selected journalist Mounira Thabet as the person of the event. The festival’s mascot will be the character of Bint El Balad, created by the late Egyptian cartoonist Mohamed Abdel Moneim Rakha.
According to artist Abdullah Al-Sawy, the festival is dedicated to caricatures of women, focusing on their images and issues and defending their rights through the works that will be presented
The festival will play an important role in establishing cultural bridges between the caricatures of Egyptian women, Arabs, and foreigners from different countries, encouraging cultural interaction and maximizing its return on creativity in the field of caricature.
The event will also include a caricature exhibition about women that will last two weeks and feature 200 paintings. Three free workshops will be held on the sidelines of the festival to teach girls the principles of drawing and caricature portraiture for five days, from February 18 to 22. In addition, a competition on Egyptian pioneers in the twentieth century will be held among workshop participants, and several seminars will be conducted during the festival period.
Eric Leubah, the French cultural attaché in Egypt, expressed his gratitude to the festival organizers and thanked the French Institute for supporting the event.
