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Back to: Youssef Chahine Program

About Youssef Chahine:

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1926, Gabriel Youssef Chahine was educated at Alexandria University, then trained as a (Method) actor at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. Returning to Egypt in 1948, he directed his first film, Baba Amin, in 1950 at the age of 24. That folk comedy was the first of more than 30 movies in which Chahine has explored an astonishing range of filmmaking genres. Writing about this Egyptian auteur in FILM COMMENT magazine, Dave Kehr lists rural dramas, screwball comedies, costume pictures, musicals, film noir, political thrillers, widescreen epics, Bergman-esque psychodrama, social protest films, and autobiography among the forms Chahine has worked and transfigured. Along with his delight in playing with cinematic genres, this eclectic director is as adept as the French New Wavers once were in conjuring cinematic styles associated with other auteurs, such as Orson Welles, Carl Dreyer, Michelangelo Antonioni, Douglas Sirk, and even Leo McCarey. But like Godard and Truffaut, Chahine glories in allusions by making them his own, acknowledging another artist's handiwork but always shaping it into his own unique cinematic signature. Also in the tradition of Truffaut, Chahine is a man who loves making movies--Kehr identifies him as an artist "who lives to lay out shots, to cut film, to huddle with actors.... Ra?O4aEÅžns730?d?`Åíg'(C)OEUÅL3/4dÅOYÅL9;ÅsyÅN1RFÅèbAERssÅEOÅ}kvSN???uÅèaeÅ—e`ÅPE12iÅLMJ feÅL,aÅ—oÅL1/4pu?/1oÅNÅP1i`É 1EÅL1RoÅLI8oÅNÅëEÅLÅ—?a`3\M/U^aÅLda^nA^?ÅèO^IXÅrAÅcAÅL
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