It happened in 1950. At the time, twenty-year-old Egyptian film lover Youssef Chahine showed up unannounced at the Venetian Mostra with two rolls of his second film Le fils du Nil, and the festival’s selector squeezed him into one of the not very popular morning screenings. Before his film’s screening, Chahine sat on a terrace of a café bar close to the main movie theatre that seats 2000 viewers and observed the audience. He managed to count seven people, out of which three were Egyptian. Soon, a miracle happened. A big storm chased idle tourists away from Lido’s beaches and in a panic and dressed in their swimming suits they flocked into the movie theater. And suddenly the movie theatre was full.
After forty-seven years, Cannes finally paid its dues to Chahine and did it in the most wonderful way by awarding him with the Golden Palm for Lifetime achievement. On that occasion Grand Theatre Lumiere in Cannes was full as well, but tuxedos had replaced the swimming suits.
As an irreplaceable link to “exotic” cinema that, just like the Indian, rests on a strong industry of populist hits, Chahine never ceased treating film as a means of entertainment. It all started with his film Devil of the Sahara (1954) in which he introduced us to an, at that time, anonymous and very young Omar Sharif. Only four years later, his great film Cairo Station, which is simultaneously as sensual as his lemonade salesgirl, as dark and cruel as Hitchcock and as campy as the performance of Chahine’s rock’n’roll group Mike and His Skyrockets, secured him the status of the most intriguing Egyptian filmmaker. However, that same year in Cannes this film was booed and the critics were said to have thought that Chahine was crazy. And when this craziness (read: nonconformity) went too far, Chahine turned to political propaganda and commercial productions and made his masterpiece The Earth.
Maybe the character of the charismatic filmmaker Yehia, who in the second part of the author’s famous Alexandria trilogy smokes a hundred and twenty cigarettes a day and dies in a hospital waiting for a bypass surgery, really is Chahine’s alter ego who questions his own past. But the author’s eclectic intertwining of personal and political issues constantly draws inspiration from all possible genres, from historical spectacles to westerns, from political film to anti-integration musical. Even when the author’s craziness manifests itself in utterly bizarre forms, such as in his film Destiny (Al massir), the two hour long costumed spectacle into which he incorporated Averroes’ Aristotle-like doctrines and that in addition combines his Islamic rationalism and theories of two-sided truth with dance and singing, there is enough room for romantic love, unwanted pregnancies, handsome kalif’s sons and capricious Gypsy femme fatales. Thus are Chahine’s energetic pieces transformed into sumptuous hymns of freedom that scream loudly against ideological hysteria. “Thoughts have wings and nothing can stop them from flying” is the final sentence in Destiny. True and strong in its simplicity, this thought is the motto of the entire Chahine’s opus, which is so Mediterranean in its pulsing energy. That is why we did not have to waste time thinking about which author’s retrospective should be shown during the Mediterranean film games.
(Dragan Rubeša, program's selector)