With the passing of Shadi Abdel-Salam on 8 October 1986, Egyptian cinema lost one of its most remarkable figures. Art director, costume designer, and history advisor as well as screenwriter and filmmaker, Abdel-Salam is internationally celebrated for his for his long narrative gem Al-Mummia (The Night of Counting The Years, 1969), which won the FIPRESCI award at the Carthage Film Festival and the French Georges-Sadoul Prize (given annually to a French film and one or two foreign films), among others. But he also played an indispensable role in such historical films as Wa Islamah (Oh Islam!, 1969) by Andrew Marton, Saladin (1963) by Youssef Chahine and Amir Al-Dahaa (The Crafty One, 1964) by Henry Barakat.

A documentary by filmmaker Ahmed Rashwan entitled Shadi: Onshoudat Al-Baath (Shadi: the Hymn of Resurrection) was broadcast on Al-Jazeera documentary channel last week. Inspired by some of the visual elements of Al-Mummia, Rashwan starts his film with shots of the pillars and the murals of Luxor Temple, showing the faces of young Egyptian art scholars who seem to be studying these monuments by drawing, an introduction as much to Abdel-Salam’s life as his philosophy. Abdel-Salam’s character emerges through interviews with some of his colleagues and students. These include art director Onsi Abu Seif, who produced the imitation sarcophagi and accessories, making them identical to the originals, for Al-Mummia in making some of the imitated sarcophagi and accessories to be identical to the original ones. They also include Rahma Montasar, who was an assistant to the film’s editor Kamal Abul-Ela and was also married to Abdel-Salam’s student the late Salah Marei, one of the most talented production designers and art directors in Egyptian cinema.

Rashwan also interviewed the filmmaker Yousry Nasrallah as he was Abdel-Salam’s neighbour and one of his friends, and perhaps Abdel-Salam was among the reasons Nasrallah fell in love with the glamour of cinema in his teens. Studying his cinematic project, Rashwan also interviewed Mahmoud Mabrouk, a professor of sculpture at the Faculty of Applied Arts and Ahmed Nabil, a documentary filmmaker, as well as film critics like Mahmoud Abdel-Shakour and Osama Abdel-Fattah. He mixes these interviews with rare footage of Abdel-Salam working on some of his projects, scenes from his films or films to which he contributed, and an archival audio interview with him speaking about some pivotal steps of his career.  

After studying history and philosophy in England Abdel-Salam returned to Cairo study architecture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, but started to work in the field of cinema. The earliest major step in his career was when he became artistic consultant in the historical film Pharaoh, directed by the Polish filmmaker Jerzy Kawalerowicz. The film, which tells the story of Ramses XIII, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966 and was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1967.

Rashwan explains the circumstances that led Abdel-Salam to make his iconic long narrative film, Al-Mummia at length. When the famous filmmaker and leader of the Italian Neorealism movement Roberto Rossellini visited Egypt to work on a historical film project, he met culture minister Tharwat Okasha. Perhaps Okasha was intrigued by the Neorealism movement, and he wanted Egyptian cinema to follow. He asked him to nominate three projects that might be the seed of a state mega production. Al-Mummia was one of his nominations. For some time the project wasn’t approved because some officials believed that the film was against the idea of Pan-Aarabism, until Abdel-Salam met Mustafa Darwish, the director of the Censorship Authority, who then approved the script.

Traditionally such a documentary should include some biographical information about the subject, and Rashwan mentions Abdel-Salam birthplace which is Alexandria, and as his family origins in Minya in Upper Egypt. This is significant because those two places may have influenced Abdel-Salam’s perception of himself, Egypt and the world. It is part of the discussion of his intellectual project, which can be understood from Al-Mummia and his short narrative film Al-Fallah Al-Fasih (The Eloquent Peasant, 1970). The first film was not about a tribe that plunders ancient Egyptian tombs but rather the resurrection of the protagonist Wanis who happens to be a member of that tribe. On the other hand, the other film is mainly about justice, inspired by an ancient Egyptian papyrus. As the interviewees suggested, Abdel-Salam thought of history as a trigger to discuss timeless and courageous questions about identity and power even under a totalitarian regime.

After winning some recognition from some critics abroad with several international awards, Abdel-Salam mentioned that he had no choice but to accept an office job, when Okasha asked him to launch the centre of experimental film. He believed he wouldn’t be able to work in commercial cinema as a filmmaker, but he managed to build a group of new graduates who shared his passion for human concerns and artistic cinema.

Abdel-Salam’s origin was the place where Akhenaton had chosen to make his new seat, a few hundred kilometres north of the old capital, Luxor. Akhenaton was the film that Abdel-Salam passed away before shooting, but he worked for months on preparations of the film. Rashwan includes some of the casting shots of the actors that were supposed to act in it like Sawsan Badr. The film contains one of the most important debates that have come up repeatedly since Abdel-Salam’s departure: should  Akhenaton, his last project, be directed by another filmmaker or should it be kept as it is and left only as part of his museum in Bibliotheca Alexandrina. It seems that most of the interviewees in the film are in favour of keeping the Akhenaton sketches and accessories at the museum.

Towards the end of the film Rashwan investigates the attempt to complete the Akhenaton project when filmmaker and producer Karim Gamal El-Din, who was the owner and director of Studio Misr from 2000-2020, had an ambitious plan to restore the status of Studio Misr, once a major pillar of the Egyptian Cinema industry, and felt at that time (more than 12 years ago) that more than 15 years of work in preparation by Abdel-Salam and his colleagues’ shouldn’t go to waste. However, the project didn’t come to light due to many factors. One of them was the belief of Abdel-Salam’s students and friends that the project shouldn’t be undertaken by anyone else and perhaps when Salah Marei passed away no one was even able to continue this important project. Unfortunately, most of Abdel-Salam’s students and even fans have doubts about any attempt to continue this project, it seems that Akhenaton will remain Abdel-Salam’s unmade film forever.

Rashwan ends his film with a very emotional quotation by Nasrallah, who says that Shadi was searching for the real Egypt when he dug into the Pharaonic era, and he concludes, “Shadi is larger than life.” No doubt Sharif Al Wissemi’s score contributed to making this close so moving.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 20 October, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.