Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Terri Ginsberg
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alongside Hind Rustom and Omar Sharif, while in A Man in Our House (Henri Barakat, 1961), he plays the opportunistic cousin who willingly exploits the situation. In Lost Love (Barakat, 1970), Abaza’s character cheats on his wife (Zubeida Tharwat) with her best friend (Hosni). Abaza also starred in comedies where, in contrast, he plays a hapless victim of the canny ploys of a witty and relentless female—most memorably in Too Young for Love (Niazi Mustafa, 1966), opposite Hosni. In The Little Witch (Mustafa, 1963), he is tormented, also by Hosni, who mistakes him for her estranged father, moves into his house, and disrupts his bachelor lifestyle, while in Wife Number 13 (Fatin Abdel-Wahab, 1962), his bride (Shadia) refuses to consummate their relationship after she discovers that he is a serial romantic who quickly loses interest after marriage. Similarly, in Beware of Eve (Abdel-Wahab, 1962), he plays a veterinary doctor who ultimately tames an ill-tempered shrew (Loubna Abdel Aziz). Abaza married actresses Sabah, Tahiyya Carioca, and Samia Gamal and continued to act until he fell ill and died before completing his role in the 1982 film The Strong Men (Ashraf Fahmy).
ABBASS, HIAM (1960–)
An increasingly visible figure in contemporary world cinema, Palestinian actress Abbass has appeared in several landmark Middle Eastern films. The most recent of these is Amreeka (Cherien Dabis, 2009), arguably the first Palestinian–American feature, in which she plays a sharp-tongued immigrant to the United States from the Occupied Palestinian Territories—a role that resituates but reprises her more militant role as a beur organizer in Living in Paradise (Bourlem Guerdjou, 1998). Abbass’s star persona is one of cool, often enigmatic introspection coupled with intelligent, principled resistance, characteristics that have led to her successful casting in Palestinian as well as Israeli films, notably Haifa (Rashid Masharawi, 1996), The Syrian Bride (Eran Riklis, 2004), Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, 2005), Free Zone (Amos Gitai, 2005), Disengagement (Gitai, 2007), and Lemon Tree (Riklis, 2008), for which she won the Best Actress award from the Israeli Film Academy. Born in Nazareth and raised as a traditional Muslim, Abbass has also appeared in numerous international coproductions, including Ali, Rabia and the Others (Ahmed Boulane, 2000), Satin Rouge (Raja Amari, 2002), and Gate of the Sun (Yousry Nasrallah, 2003). In 2010, she appeared in Miral, American Jewish painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s melodramatic feature about a Jerusalem boarding school for orphaned Palestinian girls, widely viewed as an instance of hasbara; and in 2013, she costarred alongside Nadine Labaki in Leïla Marrakchi’s Rock the Casbah, set at a funeral at which the deceased (Omar Sharif) appears onscreen as an invisible witness to his family’s strained interactions.
ABDEL SAYED, DAOUD (1946–)
An Egyptian director who graduated from the Cairo Higher Cinema Institute in 1968 and worked as assistant director to Kamal El-Sheikh and Youssef Chahine, Daoud Abdel Sayed later became closely associated with the New Realist movement of the 1980s and 1990s. His first feature, The Vagabonds (1983), tells the story of two tramps who become rich drug dealers and lose their friendship because of their greed. In Kit Kat (1991), the title referring to a popular district in north Cairo, the main protagonist is a blind man, Sheikh Hosni (Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz), who spends most of his evenings playing the lute, singing, and smoking hash with his friends. His son, finding little future in Egypt, sets his hopes on traveling abroad to the Persian/Arabian Gulf—only to discover that the money he needs has been squandered by his father. Abdel Sayed’s protagonists have frequently been contradictory in their behavior, and his films often present a deep exploration of the complexities of his characters, rarely simplifying issues of motivation or morality. In Land of Fear (2000), we see a mainstream-looking film packed with action and romance. Yet within the somewhat typical narrative (a policeman goes undercover in order to infiltrate drug rings), we witness the existential conflict of a hero (Ahmed Zaki) plagued with solitude and uncertainty. The voice-over narration that punctuates the film recurs with a more satirical tone in A Citizen, a Detective, and a Thief (2001), starring Khaled Abu Naga, Hend Sabri, and popular singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim. The citizen character (Abu Naga) is a Westernized, liberal-elite author whose harmonious life is disrupted by the theft of his car—a random event that brings him into contact with a domestic servant (Sabri). The series of events that follow are as bizarre as they are unlikely—with Abdel Sayed maintaining an in-depth analysis of his characters, cross-class relations, and assumptions regarding high/low culture. A focus on moral corruption manifests the director’s ongoing concern with an issue considered crucial by the New Realist filmmakers during the 1980s, evident in Messages from the Sea (2010), a story of exile and return set in Alexandria, and Out of the Ordinary (2014), albeit a marked departure from realist aesthetics.
ABDEL WAHAB, MOHAMED (1907–1991)
A highly inventive, extremely prolific, and immensely popular composer, musician, and singer, Abdel Wahab considerably expanded and developed Arabic music, adding Western rhythms and new instrumentation, and—partly at the suggestion of Mohammad Karim, who directed him in seven feature films—devising shorter variations of traditional forms. Born in Cairo, Abdel Wahab began recording music at the age of 13 and was already popular throughout the Arab world from radio broadcasts by the time he began a collaboration with Karim in a series of musicals, beginning with The White Rose (1934) and ending with I’m No Angel (1947). After this, he made a cameo performance in Flirtation of Girls (Anwar Wagdi, 1949), playing himself, performing one of his songs, and conducting a vast orchestra in friend Yussuf Wahbi’s house in the middle of the night at the climax of the film. Giving up cinema in the 1950s, he continued his singing in the 1960s and his composing long after—reflected in his broadly modernist experimentation with musical forms. In 1964, he wrote the first of several songs for his longtime rival at the pinnacle of Egyptian music, marking the first time that the much more traditionally minded Umm Kulthum is accompanied by an electric guitar. The popularity of these two figures, in particular, was a factor in establishing the primacy of Egyptian sound cinema in the Arab world.
ABDEL-AZIZ, MAHMOUD (1946–2016)
After receiving a master’s degree in agriculture from the University of Alexandria, Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz began his career during the late 1980s as an actor in Egyptian television. Although cast in serious films such as Shafika and Metwally (Ali Badrakhan, 1978) and Hunger (1986), he also often played comic roles in films that touched on social issues. Dimwitted, earnest, and endearing, he is the half-wit in The Palm Agency (Hossam Eddin Mostafa, 1982)—named after a district in Cairo—while The Flat Is the Wife’s Legal Right (Omar Abdel-Aziz, 1985) features a classic scene in which Abdel-Aziz sits on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, legs crossed, elbow deep in a washing pail, singing loudly in an attempt to aggravate his ex-wife and her mother. In Beast Race (Ali Abdel-Khaliq, 1987), he agrees to a lobotomy, then regrets his decision and offers his riches for the chance to reverse the procedure before going mad with despair at the loss of his “cantaloupe” (the area of his brain that represents his potency).
Abdel-Aziz worked with a number of New Realist directors and was quickly associated with their movement. He starred in Ra’fat El-Mihi’s The Gentleman (1987), Fish, Milk, and Tamarind (1988), and Dear Ladies (1990), in which he is married to four career-oriented women simultaneously and ends up pregnant. However, he is best known for his role as Sheikh Hosni in Kit Kat (Daoud Abdel Sayed, 1991), in which he plays a blind man who lives with his mother and son. He also costarred with actresses Naglaa Fathi (Excuse Me, It’s the Law [Inas al-Deghidi, 1985]), Mervat Amin (The World on the Wings of a Dove [Atef El-Tayeb, 1989]), Abla Kamel (Ika’s Law [Ashraf