Sharjah Film Platform - First Edition
January 2019

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Youssef Chahine’s death, I programmed 3 films by him from 3 different decades.
All films were screened in Africa Hall in Sharjah.

January 19 and 22: Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine, 1958)
Chahine plays a disabled news vendor whose obsession with a beautiful young lemonade stand vendor leads to violence. Cairo Station marked a new approach to Egyptian cinema in the 1950s, tackling controversial subject matter and drawing on formal and thematic elements from both neo-realism and German expressionism. 

https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/events/sharjah-film-platform-programme-3
https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/events/sharjah-film-platform-programme-31

January 20 and 24: The Land (Youssef Chahine, 1969)
The Land traces the struggle of a group of peasant farmers in the 1930s to protect their fields and their livelihoods from a corrupt pasha. Adapted by Chahine from a novel published soon after Egypt’s 1952 revolution, the film offers a rallying cry for an Arab world demoralised by the Israeli expansion of the 1960s.

https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/events/sharjah-film-platform-programme-9
https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/events/sharjah-film-platform-programme-91

January 21 and 26: The Sixth Day (Youssef Chahine, 1986) 
Based on the novel by Andrée Chedid, the film is set during the Egyptian cholera epidemic of 1947. Sadika takes care of her bedridden husband and her cholera-infected son. She develops a relationship with the young street performer Okka, whose life-affirming spirit is a welcome challenge to the atmosphere of death that overwhelms her impoverished Cairo neighbourhood.

https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/events/sharjah-film-platform-programme-16
https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/events/sharjah-film-platform-programme-161