Master Hassan (1952) is the story of a man who leaves his wife and child to live with a rich woman on “the other side of the Nile” in the upper-class Cairo district of Zamalek; Raya and Sakina (1953) is a dramatic reenactment of a real-life Alexandrian crime story, concerning two female serial killers who prey on young women; The Monster (1954) is a crime story about an underworld controlled by a lower-class criminal and brutal landowner; while The Thug (aka The Tough Guy) (1957) concerns a young peasant’s struggle to survive as a trader in a Cairo vegetable market controlled by malicious locals. Despite their focus on the lower classes, these films are highly polished commercial studio productions that make use of the star system.
In what some have considered to be a betrayal of his previous social commitment, Abu Seif then shifted his focus to the upper bourgeoisie and aristocracy in films featuring morally complex characters but predictable endings. He frequently collaborated with Naguib Mahfouz as a scriptwriter and directed classic adaptations of Beginning and End (1960), starring Omar Sharif, and Cairo 30 (1966). Through his adaptations of the work of Ihsan Abdel Quddus, he also portrayed somewhat independent-minded women embroiled in illicit love affairs: The Empty Pillow (1957) and I Am Free (1959), both starring Loubna Abdel Aziz; and I Can’t Sleep (aka Nights without Sleep) (1957), The Closed Road (aka The Dead End) (1958), and Don’t Extinguish the Sun (1961), starring Faten Hamama, who also features in I Am Free. In A Woman’s Youth (1956), Tahiyya Carioca plays an older woman who uses her power to seduce and manipulate a young student.
But Abu Seif’s films were not always so serious and morally coded. In Between Heaven and Earth (1959), he places characters from different classes and backgrounds in an elevator stuck between two floors: in a comic ensemble of star performers, Hind Rustom plays a glamorous film star who is confronted with having to deliver a baby, and Abdel-Moniem Ibrahim a madman who has escaped from an asylum and bickers with a peasant (fellah) carrying a large tray of cooked game on his head. Still, Abu Seif made a valuable contribution to the political environment in which he worked—most notably with Case Number 68 (1968), in which he criticized the rampant corruption of the socialist policies of the time. More subtly, the opening of The Malatili Baths (1973), featuring shots of Cairo’s numerous statues of historical figures, demonstrated Abu Seif’s ability to adopt an experimental style, and while some have dismissed it as cheap sensationalism due to its overt sexual content, the film has been commended as one of the first Egyptian productions to include a relatively nuanced depiction of a homosexual character.
ABU SHADI, ‘ALI (1947–2017)
An Egyptian film critic and former member of the New Cinema Group, Abu Shadi wrote a number of critical surveys of Egyptian cinema and documentary. In 1996, he became Egypt’s chief censor, and was also director of the National Film Center, the annual National Film Festival, and the Ismailia International Film Festival.
ABU-ASSAD, HANY (1961–)
Born in Nazareth, Abu-Assad emigrated from Palestine–Israel to the Netherlands in 1980, where he studied engineering and first worked as a technical airplane engineer. His cinematic career began as a producer for television documentaries broadcast on England’s Channel 4 and the BBC. In 1992, he wrote and directed his first film, Paper House (aka House of Cards), which portrays a young Palestinian teenager trying to rebuild his family home after its destruction by the Israel Defense Forces. After writing and directing another short and serving as producer and director’s assistant for Curfew (Rashid Masharawi, 1993), Abu-Assad began his first full-length feature project as director of The Fourteenth Chick (1998), a comedy about a couple in Amsterdam. He followed that with a satirical documentary made for Dutch television, Nazareth 2000 (2000), about Palestinian Christians and Muslims quarreling, as seen through the eyes of two gasoline station attendants.
A common theme in Abu-Assad’s subsequent five films has been the Palestinian experience of physical fragmentation due to the Israeli Occupation and its impact on personal relations. Thus, in Rana’s Wedding: Another Day in Jerusalem (2002), a woman is not only separated from her fiancé by a checkpoint but ends up marrying him at one. Regarding larger political and social relations, Ford Transit (2002) depicts a taxi driver earning income due to checkpoints, as his clients shift their daily routine to circumvent or pass through them. Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005), depicting the last days of two would-be suicide bombers, gained him international recognition, as well as a fair dose of controversy, thus making him perhaps the most internationally famous contemporary Palestinian filmmaker. Omar (2013) takes on the subject of collaboration and explores how the Israeli security forces pressure youth to spy on each other, additionally fragmenting relationships, families, and society. The Idol (2015) is a dramatization of the real-life story of Gaza-born singer Mohammed Assaf, who overcame the odds to become an overnight success story in the Arab Idol singing competition by illegally crossing the border into Egypt. Abu-Assad also directed the Hollywood-produced film The Mountain between Us (2017), about the survivors of a plane crash who must overcome their differences in order to survive—it is his first feature film not to focus on the Palestinian experience.
ADIÓS CARMEN (2013)
Using Amazigh languages in addition to Arabic and Spanish, Mohamed Amin Benamraoui’s film is an intimate historical tale set in the Rif of Morocco during the early 1970s at a time of growing tensions between Morocco and Spain. It focuses on a lonely 10-year-old boy, Amar, who becomes close friends with Carmen, an older Spanish usherette in a cinema. Carmen takes Amar under her wing and introduces him to films made in a language he does not understand, which serve progressively to compensate for an absent mother and an abusive uncle. Meanwhile, he discreetly carries messages between Carmen and her Moroccan lover.
ADRIFT ON THE NILE (CHATTER ON THE NILE) (1971)
Based on a novel by Naguib Mahfouz and directed by Hussein Kamal, Adrift on the Nile is arguably the most realistic depiction of drug use in Egypt, focusing primarily on a group of users from different segments of society (including a lawyer, an actor [Ahmed Ramzy], and a journalist), who gather to drink, party, and smoke hashish from a traditional homemade water pipe (koza) on a houseboat. The story is narrated by Anis Zaki (Emad Hamdi), an embittered petty government official who comments on the nation’s hypocrisy. On an excursion to the ancient ruins at Memphis, the group clambers onto a massive statue—while the women caress its face, the men light up and joke that the statue is also stoned. On the way back, the hedonistic group accidentally runs over a peasant woman with their car. Unable to think clearly, they decide to cover up the incident instead of reporting it, and each of them offers an excuse, blaming the government and then laughing the matter off—an allusion to the moral corruption of the time, involving specifically those who betrayed the ideals of independence and socialism for selfish gain. The final image, Anis—who has finally come to question the group’s behavior—walking through the streets of Cairo shouting, “The peasant woman is dead and we have to turn ourselves in,” is one of the most powerful endings in Egyptian cinema.
AFGHANISTAN
Historically, a geographical region contested by European colonial powers, epitomized by the “great game” for control of central Asia between Great Britain and Russia during the 19th century, much of Afghanistan was once part of the Persian Empire, and the western city of Herat, in particular, retains many cultural ties to Iran. The rise of the Taliban and the armed struggle that has continued throughout much of the country since their displacement by American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops following the events of 11 September 2001 resulted in many Afghans
