Mediterranean Literary Festival kicks off in Cairo

The Festival will host authors and intellectuals from the two sides of the Mediterranean, such as the French Philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky, Italian writers Simonetta Agnello Hornby and Alessandro Golinelli, the Lebanese director Jocelyne Saab and the Spanish writer Maria Laura Espido Freire. After the relationship between literature and comedy and literature and the city, it is now the turn of the Body, whose perception and vision through time has changed significantly on both sides of the Mediterranean and will be indeed discussed and explored through films and debates. The event will be inaugurated this evening with a reading by actress and director Fernanda Calati from the book ''Body'' by Tiziano Scarpa, telling fifty different parts of our body with five hundred aphorisms. The location is the Italian Institute of Culture which will host until next Monday conferences, films and debates on the relationship between literature and the body, its senses and also human rights. The Italian Institute of Culture will also hold a conference by Simonetta Agnello Hornby on ''Food, the body and senses in literature'' and will screen the film ''Angels on Death Row. The Ebrahim Hamidi's Case'', a documentary which starting from the case of the young Hamidi being sentenced to death for homosexuality, reveals the harsh life conditions which gay men are subjected to in Iran. One of the two authors of the film, Alessandro Golinelli, will be there to present his latest book ''Love, simply'', which tells a love story made of intense looks and stares during the escape of six hundred prisoners of the red army from the extermination camp of Mauthausen in 1945.