Saladin the Victorious

Conceived as an ode to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, this titanic super spectacle, set in the twelfth-century Crusades, is Egyptian cinema’s rebuttal to the Hollywood Christian epic. Ahmed Mazhar—a military-academy classmate of Nasser’s—stars as Saladin, the ruler of the kingdoms surrounding Jerusalem. When Christian invaders slaughter a band of Muslim pilgrims, Saladin sets out to take back the holy land against all odds. Working with an unprecedented budget (so big, in fact, that it bankrupted the producer) and a cast of thousands, director Youssef Chahine’s most large-scale work is a rousing vision of pan-Arab unity realized with the director’s trademark visual dynamism.