In a recent conversation about comedy superstar Adel Imam, I realised I’d never seen his box office failure Al-Hareef (The Street Player, 1983) by the late director Mohamed Khan, who died on 26 July eight years ago. The Street Player became part of a private retrospective of Khan’s work that I put together for my edification. It ended with his iconic Maw’ed Ala Al-Ashaa (A Dinner Date, 1981), which I saw only last week.
Khan was a screenwriter and actor as well as a filmmaker, but it is for his vision as a cornerstone of the 1980s neorealist movement — together with Khairy Beshara, Daoud Abdel-Sayed and Atef Al-Tayeb — that he is celebrated. And it is a fascinating vision immediately evident in his work.
Born in 1942 in Abdine, in the heart of Cairo, Khan had an Egyptian mother and a Pakistani-British father. There was an open-air cinema next to the house in which he grew up, and besides frequently going he would listen to the same film over and over while at home. This gave him a unique understanding of film scores. In 1956 Khan went to England to study architecture but he soon realised cinema was the only career he could have, and he returned in 1963 with a diploma in filmmaking. In his earliest short films — Dayei (Lost), Al-Haram (The Pyramid), Bateekha (Watermelon) — the connection with Cairo is already evident.
Khan worked with the pioneer of Egyptian realism Salah Abu-Seif as a script reader before moving to Beirut to assist a number of Lebanese directors, but he was forced to move back to England after the 1967 War. This time he did not return until 1977, when he started to start his cinematic career with Darbet Shams (Sunstroke, 1980), a pun on the protagonist’s name, Shams (meaning “sun”), a photographer who accidentally gains evidence of the crimes of a deadly crime ring. It starred Nour Al-Sherif and Noura. Khan co-wrote the screenplay with Fayez Ghal.
The 1980s, a transitional period for Egypt, were also Khan’s heyday. He zeroed in on the transition in films like Zawget Ragol Mohem (The Wife of an Important Man, 1987) and A Dinner Date (1981), the latter co-written by Khan and Beshir El-Deek and starring the legendary Soad Hosni and Ahmed Zaki together with Hussein Fahmi. Hosni plays Nawal, the oppressed and neglected wife of the narcissistic businessman Ezzat (Hussein Fahmy). Her life is limited to the phone and a few friends with whom she occasionally attends an antiques auction. Her mother, who benefits from Ezzat’s wealth, is unsympathetic.
Against her mother’s wishes, Nawal manages to get a divorce and works at her divorce lawyer’s office to finance herself, but when her mother dies suddenly at the hairdresser’s, she meets and falls in love with Shoukri (Ahmed Zaki), the hairdresser, and starts a life with him. Ezzat begins to hassle the new couple, eventually managing to have Shoukri killed — just because he can. The master scene occurs in the wake of this, when Nawal manages to lure Ezzat to dinner, poisoning herself along with him through a delicious meal.
In this film as in others Khan portrays the demise of the Egyptian middle class with the rise of a new superclass of corrupt capitalists benefiting from increasingly lawless conditions. In The Wife of an Important Man (1987), with a screenplay by Raouf Tawfik, the tyrannical police officer Hisham (Ahmed Zaki) married to the gentle romantic Mona (Mervat Amin) suddenly loses his job and his power, with disastrous consequences. In Awdet Mowaten (Return of a Citizen, 1986), Yehia Al-Fakhrany plays a man who returns to Egypt after eight years abroad working and saving money for his family — only to realise that society has transformed every one of them.
Khan’s Ahlam Hind wa Kamilia (Ahlam, Hind and Kamilia, 1989) follows the lives of two domestic worker friends, Hind and Kamilia (Aida Riyad and Naglaa Fathi respectively), struggling to make ends meet. But when Hind gives birth to Ahlam the baby becomes their solace. A year later, Khan made Supermarket (1990). Written by Assem Tawfik, it is the story of a friendship between a young pianist (Mamdouh Abdel-Aleim) and his divorced neighbour (Naglaa Fathi). There is also the famous old surgeon (Adel Adham) who represents capitalist Egypt. A subtler document of the transformation the country witnessed in the 1980s, Supermarket is often seen as Khan’s confession of his inability to accept what the country turned into.
Khan joined forces with the late legend Ahmed Zaki many times, the last being the huge box office hit Ayam Al-Sadat (Days of Sadat, 2001), a biopic of the late Egyptian president Anwar Al-Sadat starting in his youth, his marriage to former first lady Gihan, and his many struggles and challenges as an officer and a statesman. Khan also joined forces with his wife, the young screenwriter Wessam Suliman, in films like Banat West Al-Balad (Downtown Girls, 2005), starring Menna Shalabi, Hind Sabri and Khaled Abul-Naga, and Fi Shaqet Masr Al-Gedida (2007), starring Ghada Adel and Khaled Abul-Naga. His 2014 film Fatat Al-Masnaa (The Factory Girl), starring Yasmine Raes, was more successful than Abl Zahmet Al-Seif (Before the Summer Crowds, 2015).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: