Programmed August 2024

Youssef Chahine: Titan of Egyptian Cinema

Featuring a new introduction by film scholar Richard Peña For more than half a century, Youssef Chahine drew from the multicultural, cosmopolitan spirit of his home city of Alexandria to forge a passionate, extravagant, iconoclastic oeuvre that merged a quintessentially Egyptian sensibility with international influences ranging from Hollywood musicals and melodramas to European neorealism. With films like his international breakthrough, the florid psychosexual noir Cairo Station , and the searing portrait of rural class struggle The Land , Chahine displayed his willingness to court controversy through daring social and political critique, while in works like Alexandria . . . Why? (the first in a quartet of autobiographical films centered around the city) he turned inwards to examine his own life, sexuality, and…