Word: egyptians
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...plus features achieved any kind of release in the U.S., and his only impact on Hollywood movies was that he made a star of a young Egyptian named Omar Sharif. But at film festivals, Chahine was for decades the prime, often the only, representative of an entire continent, Africa, and a world religion, Islam--though his family was Christian and his heritage Lebanese and Greek. He was both a nationalist and an internationalist, both an art-house auteur and a director of movies that were popular from Morocco to Indonesia...
...made political points--sometimes anti-U.S., often against the Egyptian hierarchy--but his didacticism was typically overwhelmed by his irrepressible urge to entertain, whether with the underclass tragedy Cairo Station (1958) or with a delirious love story like The Other (1999). Influenced by Hollywood comedy, Italian neorealism and Indian musical melodramas, he tossed everything--ideas, people, whole nations and regions--up in the air for the intoxicated viewer to try to catch...
...Twenty years later Chahine made Alexandria...Why, which would launch his own Alexandria quartet; it was followed by An Egyptian Story (1982), Alexandria Again and Again (1990), and Alexandria...New York (2004). The first film is set in Egypt during the war, when Arab nationalists were killing English soldiers and plotting the assassination of Winston Churchill - anything to get the British Empire out of Palestine...
...toward Raymond in The Manchurian Candidate). When Chahine behaved well and got festival prizes, Egypt was proud; when he criticized powerful political interests, she sent him to bed without supper. His epic Once Upon a Time on the Nile, about the building of the Aswan Dam, was the first Egyptian-Soviet coproduction, but both sponsors were displeased by the director's cut, demanding reshooting and re-editing. The film, begun in 1968, was not released until...
...value, it wouldn't hurt for Americans to see the visions of a cosmopolitan filmmaker from the Arab world, who speaks for himself but reflects the dreams and fears of a people whose popular culture is nearly unknown in the U.S. In the lyrics from that song in An Egyptian Story we hear, in all their naked emotion, the national fervor and questing heart of Youssef Chahine...