11th Panorama of
the European Film
for Zawya

In 2018, I was invited to design the identity for the 11th Panorama of the European Film (you can check out the 10th edition here). The PEF is a (mostly) annual film festival - organized by Zawya - bringing critically acclaimed European films to an Egyptian audience. Aside from having previously worked at Zawya/ at Misr International Films (Zawya’s mother company), I also hold the PEF dear, because I watched Lars von Trier’s ‘Dancer in the Dark’ in 2000 as part of the 1st ever PEF with my aunt when I was a kid. It was so different from anything I had ever seen on a big screen and it stayed with me and so to be working on the Panorama felt very full-circle for me.

This time around the idea that I wanted to express in the event’s identity was that cinema allows us to see the world through the filmmaker’s eyes or that it gives us a glimpse into who they are and how they think &/ how they see the world. I used old, black and white photographs, cutting out the director’s or camera-person’s face and revealing colorful patterns behind them. I added fine red lines to connect the 2 languages, and I paired a very wide font with a narrow one (shoutout to Bukra and 29LT). I also used these red strips of lines and text to frame certain applications of the identity. 

Initially I was proposing a very different color scheme: a pastel direction, paired with strong black and white patterns and the red highlights. Unfortunately the Zawya team was not ready for pastels and sadly I am petty enough to bring it up here and now, several years later. While this great loss still eats away at me, I continue to have a very good relationship with Zawya that allows me to be this shady right now for no reason.

One thing that made this edition really fun for me was deciding not to define a particular shade of blue for the base of the designs. The previous year I had fought hard to have a consistency in how the colors looked on every application (from different suppliers, to different materials, to different printing techniques) and it had proved impossible. To free myself from the shackles of perfectionism I decided to define the background color as ‘any shade of relatively dark blue’ for the 11th edition. And so this time around everything was a different shade, but it was by design and I felt it was a fun and adaptable way to make production limitations work to our advantage.