Youssef Chahine

Youssef Chahine, a gifted writer, was at once an exceptionally brilliant filmmaker, a profoundly talented theatre director, and a film professor and teacher of distinguished renown. He left behind a vast body of film work, a monumental body of work, marked by a dynamic career spanning from 1950 to 2008. The aesthetic of his films gives him a special, if not privileged, place. His work is both subtle and metaphorical. It reveals his vision of the cultural and political world and, at times, offers autobiographical insights. His love, his disillusionments and his hopes run through his rich and flourishing body of work. The depth and passion of this work have earned him accolades at prestigious festivals such as Cannes. It is optimistic and carries a ‘moral’ message. It moves away from the usual clichés of trashy, entertainment-focused cinema, and above all from the commercial Egyptian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, which dealt with social issues in the form of melodramas that owed their success solely to legendary singers. Her films address, among other things, the struggles of the people, but also subtly raise the question of otherness in a chaotic world, undermined on all sides.

The films selected and/or analysed in this book reveal the author’s genius and bear witness to the filmmaker’s near-perfect mastery of the mechanics of cinema and screenwriting.

Youssef Chahine is, without a doubt, the creator of a comprehensive, mature and profound body of work, as recognised by his peers.

Hadj DAHMANE is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Haute-Alsace, formerly an associate professor at the Open University of Catalonia, Spain. His research focuses primarily on theatre, the subject of his numerous publications. He is particularly interested in intercultural communication. Furthermore, he is in charge of a course on visual and sound anthropology, which is also open to the public outside the university.