Dawn of a New Day

Cited by director Youssef Chahine as one of his personal favorites among his films, this florid Sirkian melodrama that doubles as a subversive portrait of class conflict in the aftermath of the 1952 Egyptian revolution. Sanaa Gamil—one of Egypt’s greatest character actors—gives a deeply felt performance as Naila, the disaffected, fortysomething wife of a wealthy, vain man whose search for meaning leads her into an affair with a poor college student (Seif Abdel-Rahman) twenty years her junior. But in a society rocked by revolution, can love transcend the social forces that separate them? DAWN OF A NEW DAY features some of the most gorgeous photography in Chahine’s oeuvre, courtesy of the great cinematographer Abdel-Aziz Fahmy.