The first of this year's popular series of KVIFF Talk debates with artists focused on the work of Egyptian director Youssef Chahine. This year, the festival presents a retrospection of this extraordinary creative talent, which has become the biggest festival show of its kind: it presents Chahine's films from the 1950s to the 1980s. In other words, an exhaustive introduction to his mind-bendingly eclectic and unclassifiable career in film.
The Egyptian journalist and dramaturge Joseph Fahim also pointed out the diversity of this director's work during the debate: "As I see it, Chahine's work can be divided into three phases. First, he deals with the transformation of the Egyptian state, then he starts to question the new system, and finally he defines himself in relation to it. His early films also attempted to adopt an American narrative, whereas by the end of his creative era America had become an antagonism to him." Fahim then emphasised Chahine's visual dissimilarity and the conspicuousness of his earlier films, which nonetheless tend to go unheeded by viewers. According to Jay Weissberg, the renowned American Variety magazine critic (who joined the debate via Skype), this is because viewers find the path to Chahine's first work the wrong way: "The problem is that we don't ever get to films from this era, and people also don't know what attitude to assume in respect of Egyptian melodrama."
Marianne Khoury, Chahine's niece and the manager of his production company Miss International Films, filled us in on more information about the director's personal life: "Youssef started to become interested in film at a very young age. When he was about seven he used to make films out of shadows above his bed. He also used to accompany his grandmother to the cinema in Alexandria. One could say that his family sacrificed itself so that he could have the chance to further his interests."
The debaters agreed that Youssef Chahine's dauntlessness, versatility and individuality made him one of the biggest film storytellers in the Arabian and African world for more than half a century. "His work was never phoney. To the contrary, he managed to capture various social classes in a very authentic way," Khoury added.
