Tag Archives: Egypt

The Youssef Chahine Podcast No. 33: Al-mummia/ The Night of Counting The Years (Shadi Abdel Salam, Egypt, 1969)

March 30, 2021Uncategorized1970, Al-mummia, Egypt, Egyptian Cinema, Shadi Abdel Salam, The Night of Counting The YearsNotesonFilm1

At the request of our listeners, we are expanding the podcast onto other instances of Egyptian cinema. We saw Shadi Abdel Salam’s Al-mummia/ The Night of Counting The Years in the wonderful version restored with the help of Martin Scorsese and the Cineteca di Bologna in 2009. It’s a truly great film: poetic, allegorical, about the past and the nation; people robbed, robbing others, robbing themselves, stealing their own past and rescuing it so that it might live in the present. But not without a cost: in one night a young man brings life to the past so it may have a future but in the process loses his father, his brother, his tribe and his home; and that past he’s rescued is heading for the metropolis where he does not yet have a stake. He’s saved it for others of a larger tribe to which he also belongs. But he has himself lost it, at least momentarily. A very beautiful film that I’m sure will reward further viewing. Much of this podcast is a combination of appreciation and queries about what we don’t yet understand.

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The New York Times Review we discuss in the podcast:

..and some other images from the film:

The date for the vilm is variously given as 1969 and 1970. Preponderance has led us to opt for 1969.

The Youssef Chahine Podcast Off-piste: In the Last Days of the City

September 15, 2020

A discussion of Tamer El Said’s In the Last Days of the City, currently screening as part of the program for Safar 2020, hosted by the Arab British Centre. The program of films can now be seen from home until the 20th of September and you can follow the link here: www.safarfilmfestival.co.uk/

In the podcast we discuss the film’s combination of documentary and fiction, It’s self-reflexiveness and it’s formal beauty. The film dramatises a dilemma of a film within a film that the filmmaker can’t make cohere whilst avoiding that very same dilemma for itself by bringing in structural elements (the four friends, the increasing force of theocracy, the national football team’s wins, the search for an apartment, the loss of a relationship, the consolations of poetry in world characterised by alienation.

Jeff Reichert has written a lovely appreciation of the film in Film Comment which can be accessed here:

The podcast can be listened to below:

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

There’s an interesting article that brings in Chahine into a discussion of the film here:

…and this other interesting article on cinema in Cairo that also mentions Tamer El Said and Chahine:

The following is a series of images discussed in the podcast:

These are just frame grabs from the film captured because they’re either so beautiful or o expressive or both.

The wonderful discussion that followed the screening can be viewed here below. I found Tamer El Said’s commentary very articulate and surprisingly moving:

José Arroyo

The Youssef Chahine Podcast No. 7: Un jour, le Nile/ An-Nil oual hayat (Egypt/ USSR, 1964)

July 9, 2020The Youssef Chahine Podcast, UncategorizedAswan Dam, Cinémathèque Française, Egypt, Henri, Pastaga, Queer Film, Ritrovato, Soviet, The Youssef Chahine PodcastNotesonFilm1

A real find, the director´s cut of a celebrated film maudit, currently made available on the Henri platform through the great generosity of the Cinémathèque Française until the 15th of July. A celebration of the Soviet-Egyptian collaboration that resulted in the building of the Aswan Dam, this film is also a critique of the dispossession and displacement it led to, a feminist critique of the loss of identity that accompanies following a husband to a new country, it can also very much be read as an inter-racial queer romance in the midst of the wrenching transformations brought on by Modernity. An extraordinary film that works on many levels, has an epic narrative sweep to accompany its 70mm Cinemascope specs, but that always brings the personal to the political and does so poetically through word, image and sound. A masterpiece of the cinema. Ou discussion of it can be listened to below: