One of my most memorable visits to Cairo's downtown cinemas was in 1994 when I attended a showing of La Reine Margot, a French film featured in that year's Cairo International Film Festival.
Hundreds of people were standing in front of various (...)
Using very simple words that touch the heart, sheikh Mahmoud Al-Tohami, a performer, or munshid, of traditional religious poetry called inshad, sings Qamaron (Moon), a traditional Sufi song in which the poet compares the beauty of the Prophet (...)
The soap opera The Back Streets, screened during Ramadan, was a love song to the Egypt of the 1930s, says Rashda Ragab
The television soap opera Al-Shawarei Al-Khalfeya, or "The Back Streets," adapted from a story by famous Egyptian writer (...)
Galal Amin's second autobiography Rahik al-Omr is much more than a personal autobiography by one of Egypt's most prominent Egyptian economists, says Rashda Ragab
Rahik al-Omr (Nectar of the Years) covers two thirds of the 20th century from the (...)
The first Festival for Children's Theatre attracted significant speakers but sparse support. Rashda Ragab was one of the few people in the audience
Last week saw the official launch of the first Festival for Children's Theatre, hailed as a solution (...)
Entertaining children for 10 days is no easy task, as Rashda Ragab finds out
With few exceptions, the 20th Cairo International Film Festival for Children, held under the title "Kids=Future", managed to choose addressing children's questions and (...)
Pantomime artist Ahmed Nabil talks to Rashda Ragab about breathing life into a dying Egyptian art form, and how, much more than this, he did it his way
A pantomime show was billed at the Small Hall at the Cairo Opera House, and so, eight-year-old (...)
Rashda Ragab explains why viewers of the second part of Al-Masraweya are disappointed
Following the end of part one of Al-Masraweya by the death of Jaffar and Hammad who belonged to the Sakhaweya family, viewers of the soap opera written by (...)
After spending 25 years in Russia, filmmaker Ashraf Abdel-Baqi has returned to Egypt to help direct a new show for children's television, Araais Moksha (Moksha Puppets), to be screened during Ramadan. Rashda Ragab went to meet him
Like Pinocchio, (...)
Rashda Ragab reviews a new version of Sleeping Beauty at the Egyptian Puppet Theatre
Al-Amira wal Tennin (The Princess and the Dragon ) is inspired by the classic fairy tale in which a prince rescues a princess who has been enchanted by a wicked (...)