Chahine as Qenawi in Bab El-Hadid, Al-Masir, Al-Mohager, Iskenderia… Leih?, Awdat Al-Ibn Al-Dal, Al-Ikhtiyar
No one has influenced Arab cinema and the Arab audience’s perception of cinema more than Youssef Chahine. He always believed that his films shouldn’t rest content with entertaining viewers but also challenge them to think and to grasp the intellectual substance underlying the action, something which earned him the reputation of being difficult.
Chahine, born on 25 January 1926, began making films in 1950 following his return from a three-year period of study in the United States. From the very beginning of his career until his departure on 27 July 2008, his style presented a marked shift from what people were used to.
The centennial of Chahine kicked off in the eighth El Gouna Film Festival with an exhibition created by Shereen Farghal, including a replica of a train carriage representing his 1958 masterpiece Bab El-Hadid (Cairo Station) with screens on three sides showing iconic clips from his filmography. The impact of the exhibition was so intriguing that the GFF’s artistic director and Chahine’s niece Marianne Khory decided to take it on tour in and outside Egypt.
Two main ideas form the core of Chahine’s contribution: classic stories as the basis of human consciousness and travel as an epistemological exercise.
In Cairo Station, together with screenwriters Abdel-Hai Adib and Mohamed Abu Youssef, Chahine creates the character of Qenawi, an eccentric, lame escapee from early-life trauma in Upper Egypt who has settled down in Cairo’s main railway station (played by Chahine himself). He develops a pathological attachment to another marginal character, Hannouma (Hend Rostom), the femme fatale who works there. It is a version of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, with Qenawi and Hannouma standing in for Quasimodo and Esmeralda. It is also an opportunity to explore society through the passengers, with a teenage love story, the rock and roll craze, and a brief comment on religious fundamentalism with two sheikhs frowning on young people dancing.
But Chahine is equally interested in Biblical tragedies. A version of the story of the Prophet Yusuf with the names changed, Al-Mohager (The Emigrant, 1994), written by Rafik El-Sabban and Khaled Youssef together with Chahine, was made when the rising tide of Islamism was at its peak; a year later Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd would be charged with apostasy, which eventually forced him out of the country. Chahine fought a legal battle against the Al-Azhar, which prohibits the portrayal of prophets, but he won the trial and the film was screened in 1995. In the film, Chahine is more interested in the journey of knowledge that his version of Joseph, Ram (Khaled El-Nabawy), undertakes than the moral and spiritual aspects of the story. Here as elsewhere he may be inspired by his own 1946 journey to study theatre and cinema in California.
The struggle against extremism might have been at the back of Chahine’s mind as an intellectual for a long time, but it was after this battle that he made Al-Masir (Destiny, 1997), about the great Arab Spanish rationalist philosopher Ibn Rushd, or Averroes (Nour El-Sherif), and his persecution by the Almohad caliphate, with Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub Al-Mansur played by Mahmoud Hemeida. The caliph’s son Nasser (Khaled El-Nabawy) travels to Egypt with Ibn Rushd’s manuscripts to save them from being burned. Ibn Rushd’s student Youssef (Fares Rahoma) travels north to France for the same reason. Chahine thus asserts the role of both Egyptian and European intellectuals in the battle against extremism. “Ideas have wings,” Ibn Rushd says in the film. “No one can stop them from reaching people.”
The journey figures more directly in the autobiographical Iskenderia… Leih? (Alexandria... Why?), which won the silver bear at the Berlinale in 1979. Written by Chahine and Mohsen Zayed, the film is filled with storylines and a broad spectrum of characters offering a beautiful picture on Alexandrian society at the moment when the Nazi army led by Erwin Rommel was marching on the city. Yahia Shokry (Mohsen Mohieddin) stands in for Chahine, who dreams of acting and cinema. The film, a true example of a hero’s journey, ends with Yahia leaving for America to make his dreams come true. In Awdat Al-Ibn Al-Dal (The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1976), a musical tragedy, based on a story in the Gospel of Luke and made when the Sadat regime was practically reversing the orientation of the country, features another version of the hero’s journey, which highlights themes of freedom and patriarchal power. The film ends when all the family members kill each other, with only the two youngest figures managing to flee at the last moment.
In 1970, Chahine directed another masterpiece, Al-Ikhtiyar (The Choice), which won the Tanit d’Or at the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia. Written by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz along with Chahine, the film follows a mysterious murder, with a mutilated corpse found by the Nile. The police guess it is the body of a man called Mahmoud (Ezzat El-Alaili), whose twin brother Sayed is a famous stage writer and university professor. The religious tragedy of of Cain and Abel may underlie the structure of the drama, but the purpose of the action is to compare two types of intellectual: one has a free spirit and doesn’t abide by any rules; the other is bound by rules and authority. The film involves a critique of the modern Egyptian intellectuals, especially in the post–1952 Revolution generation, many of whom allied themselves with the powers that be. The main theme remains murderous jealousy, however. The story suggests that the two twins are two aspects of the same person
In many of his films Chahine is fascinated by the idea of migration, movement, with travel being the hero’s will, whether undertaken to gain knowledge or to escape death, as in Al-Youm Al-Sadis (The Sixth Day, 1986), written by Hassan Al-Geretly and Chahine and based on a novel by Andrée Chedid. Chahine’s unconventional approach to historical or mythological stories usually hints at contemporary political, social, or cultural realities. This wavering of past and present in his stories is a dynamic dialectic. He isn’t trying to retell the same old stories, but using them to make an intellectual – political, social, or personal – statement, and make his audience think.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 29 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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