American Jewish painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s melodramatic feature about a Jerusalem boarding school for orphaned Palestinian girls, widely viewed as an instance of hasbara; and in 2013, she costarred alongside Nadine Labaki in Leïla Marrakchi’s Rock the Casbah, set at a funeral at which the deceased (Omar Sharif) appears onscreen as an invisible witness to his family’s strained interactions.
ABDEL SAYED, DAOUD (1946–)
An Egyptian director who graduated from the Cairo Higher Cinema Institute in 1968 and worked as assistant director to Kamal El-Sheikh and Youssef Chahine, Daoud Abdel Sayed later became closely associated with the New Realist movement of the 1980s and 1990s. His first feature, The Vagabonds (1983), tells the story of two tramps who become rich drug dealers and lose their friendship because of their greed. In Kit Kat (1991), the title referring to a popular district in north Cairo, the main protagonist is a blind man, Sheikh Hosni (Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz), who spends most of his evenings playing the lute, singing, and smoking hash with his friends. His son, finding little future in Egypt, sets his hopes on traveling abroad to the Persian/Arabian Gulf—only to discover that the money he needs has been squandered by his father. Abdel Sayed’s protagonists have frequently been contradictory in their behavior, and his films often present a deep exploration of the complexities of his characters, rarely simplifying issues of motivation or morality. In Land of Fear (2000), we see a mainstream-looking film packed with action and romance. Yet within the somewhat typical narrative (a policeman goes undercover in order to infiltrate drug rings), we witness the existential conflict of a hero (Ahmed Zaki) plagued with solitude and uncertainty. The voice-over narration that punctuates the film recurs with a more satirical tone in A Citizen, a Detective, and a Thief (2001), starring Khaled Abu Naga, Hend Sabri, and popular singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim. The citizen character (Abu Naga) is a Westernized, liberal-elite author whose harmonious life is disrupted by the theft of his car—a random event that brings him into contact with a domestic servant (Sabri). The series of events that follow are as bizarre as they are unlikely—with Abdel Sayed maintaining an in-depth analysis of his characters, cross-class relations, and assumptions regarding high/low culture. A focus on moral corruption manifests the director’s ongoing concern with an issue considered crucial by the New Realist filmmakers during the 1980s, evident in Messages from the Sea (2010), a story of exile and return set in Alexandria, and Out of the Ordinary (2014), albeit a marked departure from realist aesthetics.
ABDEL WAHAB, MOHAMED (1907–1991)
A highly inventive, extremely prolific, and immensely popular composer, musician, and singer, Abdel Wahab considerably expanded and developed Arabic music, adding Western rhythms and new instrumentation, and—partly at the suggestion of Mohammad Karim, who directed him in seven feature films—devising shorter variations of traditional forms. Born in Cairo, Abdel Wahab began recording music at the age of 13 and was already popular throughout the Arab world from radio broadcasts by the time he began a collaboration with Karim in a series of musicals, beginning with The White Rose (1934) and ending with I’m No Angel (1947). After this, he made a cameo performance in Flirtation of Girls (Anwar Wagdi, 1949), playing himself, performing one of his songs, and conducting a vast orchestra in friend Yussuf Wahbi’s house in the middle of the night at the climax of the film. Giving up cinema in the 1950s, he continued his singing in the 1960s and his composing long after—reflected in his broadly modernist experimentation with musical forms. In 1964, he wrote the first of several songs for his longtime rival at the pinnacle of Egyptian music, marking the first time that the much more traditionally minded Umm Kulthum is accompanied by an electric guitar. The popularity of these two figures, in particular, was a factor in establishing the primacy of Egyptian sound cinema in the Arab world.
ABDEL-AZIZ, MAHMOUD (1946–2016)
After receiving a master’s degree in agriculture from the University of Alexandria, Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz began his career during the late 1980s as an actor in Egyptian television. Although cast in serious films such as Shafika and Metwally (Ali Badrakhan, 1978) and Hunger (1986), he also often played comic roles in films that touched on social issues. Dimwitted, earnest, and endearing, he is the half-wit in The Palm Agency (Hossam Eddin Mostafa, 1982)—named after a district in Cairo—while The Flat Is the Wife’s Legal Right (Omar Abdel-Aziz, 1985) features a classic scene in which Abdel-Aziz sits on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, legs crossed, elbow deep in a washing pail, singing loudly in an attempt to aggravate his ex-wife and her mother. In Beast Race (Ali Abdel-Khaliq, 1987), he agrees to a lobotomy, then regrets his decision and offers his riches for the chance to reverse the procedure before going mad with despair at the loss of his “cantaloupe” (the area of his brain that represents his potency).
Abdel-Aziz worked with a number of New Realist directors and was quickly associated with their movement. He starred in Ra’fat El-Mihi’s The Gentleman (1987), Fish, Milk, and Tamarind (1988), and Dear Ladies (1990), in which he is married to four career-oriented women simultaneously and ends up pregnant. However, he is best known for his role as Sheikh Hosni in Kit Kat (Daoud Abdel Sayed, 1991), in which he plays a blind man who lives with his mother and son. He also costarred with actresses Naglaa Fathi (Excuse Me, It’s the Law [Inas al-Deghidi, 1985]), Mervat Amin (The World on the Wings of a Dove [Atef El-Tayeb, 1989]), Abla Kamel (Ika’s Law [Ashraf Fahmy, 1991]), and Ilham Shahine (Pleasure Market [Samir Seif, 1999]). After a period of absence, he featured alongside a younger generation of actors in The Magician (Radwan El-Kashef, 2002). He played a single father who struggles to preserve his daughter’s virginity in The Baby Doll Night (Adel Adib, 2008) and appeared as the gang leader in Ibrahim Abyad (Marwan Hamed, 2009). Abdel-Aziz continued to act in both television and cinema up until his death.
ABDEL-SALAM, SHADI (CHADI) (1930–1986)
A committed nationalist and liberal of the Nasserist era, Abdel-Salam, born in Alexandria, trained as an architect and worked as a set and costume designer with Egyptian directors such as Youssef Chahine, Salah Abu Seif, and Henri Barakat, as well as with Joseph Mankiewicz on Cleopatra (1963), Jerzy Kawalerowicz on the Polish Pharoa (1966), and Roberto Rossellini on the television series Mankind’s Fight for Survival (1967). In 1968, he became head of the Unit for Experimental Cinema, in which directors were given more freedom of expression, and for which he directed two documentaries: Horizons (1972), about the arts in modern Egypt, and The Armies of the Sun (1975), on the 1973 war with Israel.
Given his background in architecture, his experience in costume and set design, and his knowledge of history and philosophy, Abdel-Salam manifested his desire to rekindle the splendor of ancient Egypt, rejecting both socialist pan-Arabism and Islamism—the two solutions offered for the salvation of Egypt. Abdel-Salam’s work reveals a rigorous attempt to draw on and understand ancient Egypt and its significance within contemporary Egyptian society, most apparent in his only feature, The Night of Counting the Years (1968), also known as The Mummy. His other films, including the fictional short based on an ancient papyrus The Complaints of the Eloquent Peasant (1970), and his unfinished project, Akhenaton, about the ancient king who sought to unify Egypt, highlight his conviction that this rich past is one that remains relevant to Egyptians today. He also directed three nonfiction shorts on the subject of ancient Egypt: Tut Ankh-Amon’s Chair (1983), The Pyramids and Their Antecedents (1984), and Ramses II (1986).
ABDEL-WAHAB, FATIN (1913–1972)
Born
