I will screen selected scenes from “Cairo to the Cloud,” my documentary film-in-progress about the Cairo Geniza, a vast treasure trove of discarded manuscripts discovered in the “geniza,” or sacred storeroom of a synagogue in Old Cairo.
The Geniza contained over 350,000 documents spanning more than a thousand years of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem life in the heart of the Islamic world. It is an accidental archive of unprecedented diversity, including religious texts and a recipe for medieval Viagra, literary treasures and intimate letters, marriage contracts and business reports, magical amulets and children’s drawings.
It is a collection larger, more diverse, and, arguably, more significant than the fabled Dead Sea Scrolls. Yet over a century since its discovery, the fascinating story of the Cairo Geniza is not widely known. "Cairo to the Cloud" is the first documentary feature film to illuminate the legacy of the Geniza and the surprising world it reveals.
