Abstract
Ali Badrakhan, a prominent Egyptian ‘new wave’ director active from the 1970s until the present day, is reported to have said that ‘Egyptian cinema was shouldered by women, namely Aziza Amir, Fatma Rushdy and Assia (Dagher)’. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Fatma Rushdy herself has referred to this statement in her memoirs (quoted in Abdel Rahman 2002: 29), and the importance of the contributions of these and other women — behind the camera — to an emerging national film culture in Egypt cannot be denied. Nevertheless, the available studies about women’s contributions often focus on their acting careers, and they are remembered in Arabic or Egyptian film historiography in terms of their actual ‘visibility’ as actresses, rather than as filmmakers who wrote, directed, acted in, composed the soundtracks of, and sometimes designed the costumes and décor for, their own films.
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© 2015 Koen Van Eynde
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Van Eynde, K. (2015). Egypt. In: Nelmes, J., Selbo, J. (eds) Women Screenwriters. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312372_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312372_3
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