Photo Credit: Cairo International Film Festival&nbsp;
by Hassan El-Seddiq&nbsp;
The 44th edition of Cairo International Film Festival invited highly acclaimed director and actor Mathieu Kassovitz on the sixth day of the festival in a masterclass moderated by the festival director Amir Ramses, where Kassovitz talked about his long and celebrated career in acting and directing, and the impact of his cult classic film &ldquo;La Haine&rdquo; on the landscape of cinema in this day and age.
Mathieu Kassovitz is a renowned director who won the best director prize at 1995 Cannes Film Festival and C&eacute;sar Award for best film for his movie &ldquo;La Haine&rdquo;, he also directed multiple successful movies like &ldquo;Les Rivi&egrave;res Pourpres&rdquo; starring Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel, and &ldquo;Gothika&rdquo; starring Halle Berry and Pen&eacute;lope Cruz. His acting career isn&rsquo;t less impressive as he worked with auteur directors like Michael Haneke in &ldquo;Happy End&rdquo;, Jacques Audiard in &ldquo;A self-made hero&rdquo;, Steven Spielberg in &ldquo;Munich&rdquo; and Jean-Pierre Jeunet in &ldquo;The Fifth Element&rdquo; and probably his most popular movie &ldquo;Am&eacute;lie&rdquo;.
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The French director expressed his gratitude at the beginning of the masterclass to be invited to Cairo International Film Festival, which is considered to be one of the most prestigious festivals in the region.
Kassovitz talked about his early years when he started to work as an actor saying, &ldquo;I started as an actor when I was 12, but I really didn&rsquo;t like it, it&rsquo;s a horrible thing to do as a kid, but my father was a director, my mother was an editor&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;I was with my mother every weekend in the editing room&rdquo;
He also spoke about the moment that made him want to be a director, saying, &ldquo;We had VHS at home, and we recorded &ldquo;Jaws&rdquo; by Spielberg, and I couldn&rsquo;t see it because I was too young&rdquo; he continued that his father showed him the movie at home and asked him to watch it again and analyze it, &ldquo;I watched it again and I realized that there&rsquo;s no shark, it was just about the camera movement and how he was trying to tell people that there&rsquo;s shark there.&rdquo; Then Kassovitz researched and found that Spielberg was supposed to film a shark but due to technical issues, he couldn&rsquo;t do it, and that was the moment he was inspired as it was impressive for him how Spielberg used the camera to solve the issue. &nbsp;
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Ramses talked about his admiration for the movie &ldquo;La Haine&rdquo; and how he studied it at the beginning of his filmmaking journey and asked Kassovitz about his process of directing it and since he came from an acting background, how did he approach the aesthetics of directing a movie, Mathieu Kassovitz replied, &ldquo;The thing is I&rsquo;m not actor/director, I&rsquo;m a director/actor&hellip; if you believe that the audience is smart, then you don&rsquo;t have to show them everything, you can play with them with camera work and editing and that&rsquo;s the art of making movies, using the camera as a brush to tell a story&rdquo;
Kassovitz also said that he would rather direct than act, although he has a lot of respect for actors, he feels more comfortable as a director.
Finally, the &ldquo;La Haine&rdquo; director gave advice to new filmmakers to take advantage of Cairo International Film Festival to promote their movies and their culture which will help them in the future to distribute their movies in other countries.

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