EQYPT:YOUSSEF CHAHINE, the Arab world's greatest film-maker and recipient of the 50th annual lifetime achievement award at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, died in his home in Cairo yesterday at the age of 82. French president Nicolas Sarkozy praised him as "a fervent defender of freedom of expression".
Born in 1926 in Alexandria into a Christian family, Chahine attended prestigious Victoria College, the alma mater of many Arab and Egyptian intellectuals who made major contributions to 20th century Arab culture. After spending one year at the University of Alexandria, he went to the US to study drama at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.
Back in Egypt, he turned his talents to directing and made a series of films which established his reputation as a serious figure in the country's 20-year-old film industry.
Upon the release of his fourth film, Nile Boy(1951) he was invited to the Cannes Film Festival. Raging Sky(1953), shot when King Farouk was still on the throne, dealt with the challenge mounted by a simple farmer to his feudal landlord, establishing Chahine as independent-minded and ready to challenge authority.
He was credited with discovering Omar Sharif, who starred in The Blazing Sun, released in 1954, and became the first Arab actor to rise to stardom in Hollywood.
In his classic, Cairo Station, Chahine played the lead, a newspaper seller at the railway station who had a fatal fixation for a woman who sold lemonade. Conservative Egyptians hated the film and it was put on the shelf for 20 years.
In 1963, Chahine made Saladin, a three-hour spectacle about the Arab struggle against the Crusaders, scripted by Nobel prize laureate Naguib Mafhouz. The film drew a parallel between the Arab general and Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The Sparrow(1973) described how mismanagement and corruption led to the defeat of the Egyptian army by Israel in 1967.
Chanine won a Silver Bear at Berlin in 1978 for his Alexandria ... Why?the first of four autobiographic films. The sequence, completed in 2004, provides a picture of the ancient city as a great cosmopolitan centre.
Chahine did not confine himself to the cinema. When in 1992 he was asked to produce a play for the Comedie-Francaise, he made a highly successful adaptation of Albert Camus's Caligula.
In 1994, he shot The Emigrantbased on the biblical figure of Joseph, son of Jacob. The film was banned by a court on the insistence of Muslim fundamentalists who oppose representation of religious figures in films.
He retorted, "Every day human beings suffer a lot from people telling you to shut up, you have no right to talk, you have no right to discuss. I think this is extreme violence, and it happened to me."
Chahine's Adieu Bonaparte, an historical film about the French invasion of Egypt, was shown at Cannes in 1985 as was his Alexandria . . . New York in 2004.
During his long career, he made more than 40 films. The last, This is Chaos, was premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2007.
