Youssef Chahine, one of Egypt’s most lauded movie directors whose films over nearly five decades often went on Fellini-esque flights of fancy and tackled social ills and religious fundamentalism, died yesterday in Cairo. He was 82 years old.
“Youssef Chahine died at 3:30 a.m.,” said his friend and fellow director Khaled Yussef, who co-directed Chahine’s latest film “This Is Chaos” in 2007.
A funeral ceremony will be held in Cairo today, Yussef said, before Chahine is buried in the family crypt in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria where he was born, Egypt’s official MENA news agency said.
His death comes about four weeks after he fell into a coma following a brain hemorrhage. Chahine was flown to France in critical condition for treatment but later sent back to Al-Maadi Military Hospital in Cairo, where he died yesterday. Announcing the news, Egyptian state television showed archive images of the director and some of his films.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak promised to pay the director’s medical bills when he was taken ill, including paying for him to be flown to Paris, in “consideration of his involvement in the construction of Egyptian cinema.”
Chahine’s eclectic work made him one of the few Egyptian directors to gain an audience abroad, particularly in Europe and France, where he won a lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997.
Chahine never shied away from controversy during his long career, criticising US foreign policy as well as Egypt and the Arab world.
“He was one of the most important filmmakers in the world, not just in the Arab world,” said renowned Egyptian actor Nour Al-Sharif, paying tribute to Chahine’s “different style of cinema.”
Sometimes criticized for having a “Western” style, Chahine was “important for freedom of tone and freedom full stop,” said Magda Wassef, who heads the cinema department at the Arab World Institute in Paris.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy issued a statement yesterday calling Chahine one of cinema’s “most celebrated servants” and “a fervent defender of freedom of expression.”
“Youssef Chahine sought throughout his life to denounce, through images, censure, fanaticism and fundamentalism,” Sarkozy said.
At home, his films raised controversy for their frank portrayal of sexuality, their sharp criticism of political oppression and, in his later works, their denunciations of rising religious extremism in Egypt.
Director Daud Abd Al-Sayyed called him “one of the the most important directors. He has films that are very important to the history of Egyptian cinema,” by far the most-watched in the Arab world.
Chahine was born on Jan. 25, 1926 to a Christian family of Lebanese origin in Alexandria, the Mediterranean port known at the time as a cosmopolitan city, with large European and other foreign communities. Throughout his more than 40 films and documentaries, Chahine sought to recapture and defend the spirit of multicultural tolerance against the forces he saw undermining it — fundamentalism, dictatorship and imperialism.
Chahine grew up speaking French and English better than Arabic, and many of his films were French co-productions, bringing criticism by some at home that he was not Arab — or Egyptian — enough. But his early films became classics of social realism, giving gritty depictions of the lowest in Egyptian society.
In his 1958 “Cairo Station,” Chahine himself starred as Qenawi, a mentally retarded newspaper seller at Cairo’s main railroad station, who becomes obsessed with a woman selling lemonade.
“The Land” in 1969, seen by some as his greatest film, told an epic story of peasant farmers and landowners struggling over land in the Nile Delta.
Film critic Tarek El-Shenawi said in tribute that Chahine set the standard for generations of Egyptian directors.
“He was the master. When you see the names of those who worked with him ... you can say that the giants of Egyptian cinema graduated from the Youssef Chahine academy,” he said.
“For 60 years he was the biggest name in Egyptian cinema and he breathed cinema to the very end. Youssef Chahine lived only for cinema,” he added.
In his Alexandria Trilogy — “Alexandria, Why?” “An Egyptian Story,” and “Alexandria Again and Forever” — Chahine turned autobiographical, recounting his childhood in his hometown, his love of Hollywood and his ambiguous feeling toward the United States, which he was drawn to but also saw as an overweening power. The 1978 “Alexandria, Why?” has a scene of the Statue of Liberty giving a sneering laugh at immigrants arriving in America.
“I have a problem with America, you can call it a dilemma,” Chahine — who studied acting for two years at Pasadena Playhouse in California in the 1940s — once told an interviewer. “I used to love it very much, I studied there, my first love was there... I don’t hate America as some think... but it is difficult to sympathize with it.”
The trilogy broke with the realist style, bringing in wild scenes of fantasy, musical numbers and surrealism that drew comparisons with Italian director Frederico Fellini.
After the banning of “The Emigrant,” Chahine responded with the historical film “Destiny,” about the 12th Century Muslim philosopher Averroes, whose books were banned by extremists in the then Islamic kingdom of Andalus in what is now Spain.
His last movie, 2007’s “This Is Chaos”, was a sharp criticism of the Egyptian government’s crackdown on democracy activists, depicting a corrupt police officer who takes bribes and tortures his detainees.
Chahine is survived by his French wife Colette. He had no children.
