An Egyptian Story

The director ends up on the operating table in London. During heart surgery, his body becomes a courtroom. A courtroom opens up inside his chest, where successive versions of himself testify against one another.

In An Egyptian Story Youssef Chahine transforms his autobiography into a surrealist structure in which memory, cinema, and the history of Egypt overlap. The film unfolds between contemporary Cairo and memories of Alexandria – a multilingual, cosmopolitan city that gradually disappears after the 1952 revolution and subsequent political upheavals.

Chahine, born in 1926 in Alexandria and raised in the multicultural world of the Mediterranean borderlands, treats his own life as film material. In his cinema, Fellini meets Chaplin, and personal experience becomes a tool for telling the story of collective loss.

An Egyptian Story is both a self-analysis and an elegy for a world that has ceased to exist.

In the background of the film, the history of Egyptian surrealism resurfaces: the Art et Liberté [Art and Freedom] group, which in 1938 responded to fascism with the manifesto “Long Live Degenerate Art!” By invoking the Art et Liberté group, the film situates itself within the broader history of surrealism as an international network of political and artistic revolts.