WOMEN TO FOLLOW IN 2020 by Aya Aboshady, Nada Abdelkader & Nanise Mohamed Some days, we wake up feeling like we need a little more. A little more inspiration, some courage, and heaps of ambition. We’re sure you’ve felt like you need some of that too and this is why we’ve brought you stories full of all these ingredients and much more.
Marianne Khoury Last year a lot of women emerged in the Egyptian entertainment scene, making 2019, evidently, the year of women. Super talented actresses, singers, models, athletes and writers have surfaced and made the entire female gender in Egypt proud. While most of them are, relatively, young fresh faces, we can’t overlook the comeback of one directing veteran that is Marianne Khoury. Marianne Khoury, aged 62, is an Alexandrian-born filmmaker, director and distributor. She is the niece of the late directing legend Youssif Chahine. She collaborated with her late uncle on his films for a time period that spanned over three decades in movies like “Eskendrya Kaman W Kaman” and “El Youm El Sades” Khoury earned a degree in economics from both Cairo and Oxford Universities. But since the love for cinema basically runs in the whole family, it wasn’t long until she pursued her true passion and followed in the footsteps of her senior family members. Khoury produced and co-produced more than 30 award-winning films and documentaries. Some of them are “Araq El Balah”, “Zaman Laura” and “Zelal” which received critical acclaim and was an official entry in the Venice Film Festival and a winner of the FIPRESCI award at the Dubai Film Festival. However, it’s her 2019 feature film “Let’s Talk” that really made her shine this year and reminded everyone of “Aflam Masr El Alameya” like the 32 March 2020
power production company it is. In the movie, we see no acting and no set. The movie is more of a documentary that was first meant to be about the life of Iris, Marianne’s mother and Youssef Chahine’s sister; but at the end it turned out to be the story of all the women in that family. From the younger generation to the elder. It turned out to be the story of all Egyptian women. Marianne has masterfully managed to turn simple live events into a universal story about love, family and loss. More importantly, through the way the film traced back the women in Chahine’s family, it ended up drawing beautiful portraits of Egypt from the past to the present. At the end, we would like to thank Marianne for sharing something so personal and for making it about everyone, too. We hope she continues making great movies.
