The realist tradition in Egyptian cinema brings to mind, besides the late Kamal Selim and the late Salah Abu Seif, Tawfik Saleh — who died last month on 18 August. Saleh began his career with Darb Al-Mahabil (Imbeciles Path, 1955), a debut feature film written by the late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and starring Shukri Sarhan and Berlanti Abdel-Hamid, then at the height of their fame. It is a landmark in the history of Egyptian film, documenting the life, social and economic struggles of the Egyptian underclass living in the alleyway and no doubt influenced by the July 1952 Revolution, which was still struggling to assert its egalitarian message. Saleh became left-wing in Paris, where he went to study film after studying English literature in Cairo, travelling there in 1950, when the French capital was full of post-war thinkers and their ideas. But he never completed his course, preferring instead to spend his time in France training and working in cinema. Saleh returned in 1953 and made Darb Al-Mahabil soon afterwards, but he was not to make another fiction film until 1962, when Siraa Al-Abtal (The Heroes' Struggle), written by Abdel-Hayy Adib and Sabri Ezzat, was released. His third film, Al-Sayed Al-Bolti, based on a story by the espionage thriller writer Saleh Morsi, was released in 1967. Between his first and second films Saleh made a number of documentaries, but as of 1967 he forged ahead with his work as best he could. In the atmosphere of discontent, protest and repression following the defeat of the Nasserist experiment in the June 1967 War, Saleh was one among many intellectuals who suffered confusion and distress. He was forced by the censors to modify his fourth film, Al-Mutamaridoun (The Rebels, 1968) before it could be screened, and this contributed to the sense of isolation and marginalisation from which the least celebrated director of his generation was already suffering. In 1969 Saleh made Yawmiyat Naaib fil Aryaf (A Provincial Prosecutor's Diary), based on the great writer Tawfik Al-Hakim's eponymous book and written by the well-known playwright Alfred Farag. Yet within a year of its release president Gamal Abdel-Nasser would die, and the radical change in the political orientation of the country under his successor president Anwar Al-Sadat drove Saleh out of the Egyptian film industry altogether, making his best-known film Al-Makhdu'oun (The Deceived, 1972) with the Syrian Cinema Organisation and receiving the Golden Tanit at the Carthage Festival in Tunis as well as many other awards outside the Arab world, including the Strasbourg Human Rights Film Festival first prize and the Lenin Peace Prize in Moscow in 1973. Saleh made his last film, Al-Ayyam Al-Tawila (Long Days, 1980), which featured part of the life story of Saddam Hussein, under extremely difficult circumstances while he was teaching cinema in Iraq. He eventually fled Iraq and wandered around the Arab world for a few years, until he could have a job at the Academy of Arts back in Cairo. On his return he made no more films and was content to meet regularly for sarcastic discussions of current events with his old group of friends who identified themselves after Mahfouz's novel as the harafish (the Rabble), which included in addition to Mahfouz the actor Ahmed Mazhar, the artist Gamil Shafik and many others. *** Hours prior to the death of Tawfik Saleh, on 17 August, the Egyptian film industry also lost the critic and screenwriter Rafik Al-Sabban, who wrote regularly in many newspapers including Al-Ahram Weekly in its first years, during which he provided a weekly film review. Like Saleh, Al-Sabban — a Syrian — studied in Paris, but he earned his PhD and his initial interest was theatre. On his return to Damascus he contributed to founding the National Theatre and directed adaptations of world classics from Sophocles to Shakespeare as well as modern works by, among others, Alfred Farag and Nâzm Hikmet. Yet in the early 1970s, while Saleh was leaving Egypt, Al-Sabban arrived in the country. His debut as a screenwriter was a powerful one, with Mamdouh Shoukri's Zaair Al-Fagr (The Dawn Visitor, 1973). It had been barely two years since Sadat's Corrective Revolution, which involved freeing political detainees, demolishing detention camps, dismissing many intelligence and secret-police leaders, destroying recordings of people's conversations and otherwise making a show of ending Nasser's police state; and the title of the film, which despite reflecting the new spirit was screened only with difficulty, referred to the arrests of dissidents by the secret police, who would always arrive at someone's house at dawn. Al-Sabban's grasp of world literature qualified him for Egyptianising many classics for the local silver screen, including The Brothers Karamazov — which Richard Brooks directed for Hollywood in 1954 — as Al-Ikhwa Al-A'daa (Enemy Brothers, 1974), directed by Hossameddin Mustafa and starring Yehia Shahine, Nadia Lotfi, Nour Al-Sherif, Hussein Fahmi and Mohie Ismail. Al-Sabban wrote dozens of films and television serials, working with numerous directors: Atef Salem, Hussein Kamal, Atef Al-Tayeb and — notably — Youssef Chahine, with whom he co-wrote Al-Muhagir (The Immigrant) in 1994, and through which Chahine battled with Al-Azhar over his right to portray the prophet Joseph (whose name was changed). Al-Sabban had written Al-Samt (Silence) for director Inas Al-Degheidi before he died. Al-Sabban had an encyclopaedic knowledge of art and literature as well as film, and he is known as much for his scripts as for his writing on cinema and lectures at the Academy of Arts. Hani Mustafa
