Egypt has had a strong cinematic tradition since the 1930s having the only major motion picture industry in the Arab world, with Cairo its capital. The Egyptian cinema has a profound influence on the Arabs. The golden age of Egyptian cinema was in the 1940s and 1950s. During that period Omar Sherif emerged as a major international star and his former wife, Fatin Hamama, reigned as the queen of Arab cinema.
Directors such as Youssef Chahine have gained wide international respect and many of Egypt's leading literary lights, including Tawfiq Al Hakim and Naguib Mahfouz, have written for the cinema.
The modern atmosphere of profiteering and heavy entertainment taxes have resulted in drastically lowering the standards of the majority modern Egyptian cinema.
Youssef Chahine is one of the most forceful and complex of Egyptian filmmakers whose progress over the forty years or so since his debut at the age of twenty-four offers remarkable insight into the evolution of Egyptian society.The output of this preeminent Egyptian filmmaker is in striking contrast to the light musicals which dominate his national industry. From an early age, Youssef Chahine had been enthralled by performing. Chahine is an eclectic filmmaker whose cosmopolitan attitudes can be traced back to his origins. He was born in Alexandria in 1926 of middle-class parents. Chahine was brought up as a Christian, educated first at religious school and then at the prestigious Victoria College, where the language of tuition was English. At his family's insistence, he enrolled at Alexandria University as an engineering major but eventually . After a year at Alexandria University he persuaded his parents to allow him to study drama and to pursue an acting career, for two years at Pasadena Playhouse, near Los Angeles, where he was befriended by Robert Preston and Victor Jory. When he graduated in 1948, he returned to his homeland and apprenticed with the Italian documentarian Gianni Verniccio then enjoying a...
