An Egyptian Story 1982

Nour El-Sherif stars as Yehia Shukri Murad, a self-centered, chain-smoking, highly-strung radical realist filmmaker whose life careens toward a crisis when a heart attack interrupts a shoot. He travels to London for diagnosis and, ultimately, a bypass operation. The day before the operation, he spends time with his chauffeur, and the film shocks with a bold suggestion of a homosexual tangle between Yehia and the driver, conveyed through charged glances and unspoken tension.

As Yehia slips under anesthesia, the narrative shifts into a surreal, dreamlike courtroom housed inside his own chest. The courtroom’s roof beams are his ribs, and his inner child sits on trial, feeling abandoned by the adult Yehia and determined to strike him down. The child’s witness stand is built from clear plastic tubes, into which he drops white crystals that symbolize Yehia’s arteries and the cholesterol clogging them. Throughout the chaotic testimonies, a series of flashbacks illuminate Yehia’s life, beginning with harsh treatment by a bitter Catholic primary-school teacher.

The memories carry Yehia through pivotal moments in Egyptian history: his youth amid riots against British forces, his role in and direction of a film that alludes to Cairo Station, his relentless pursuit of Euro-American recognition at Cannes and in New York, the prize he nevertheless wins at the Moscow International Film Festival, and his work about the Battle of Algiers (1956–57), alluding to the era’s cinema. As Yehia ages, he encounters friction with censors yet stubbornly continues to shoot his banned film, a defiant arc that ends with the heart attack that frames the story.

The drama of Yehia’s life is inseparable from his family ties—his mother, his sister, and his wife Amal—each thread echoing within both the flashbacks and the courtroom sequences. The film suggests that the women’s behavior reflects their own experiences under patriarchal oppression: Yehia’s mother is compelled into marriage and motherhood at a young age and, in turn, imposes the same strictures on her daughter; Yehia himself resists letting his daughter pursue a love marriage just before his collapse. Amal, portrayed by Yousra, is likewise caught in the pressures of motherhood and Yehia’s infantile traits, a dynamic the film uses to explore power, vulnerability, and longing. The story traces how these relationships shape Yehia’s choices and his creative vision.

The finale intensifies as Yehia’s inner child faces a death sentence and dives into an artery with a knife in a bid to kill the adult Yehia. A surgeon then extracts this inner presence, and, waking from anesthesia, Yehia encounters the reclaimed child and the two merge back into one. In its closing beat, the film offers a moment of unresolved peace, a renewed self-awareness that embraces both Yehia’s complexities and his humanity.

Yehia Shukri Murad and Amal are central to this intricate tapestry, with key appearances by the performers guiding the intimate, symbolic layers of the story: Laila Hamada as Yehia’s Sister, Soheir El-Bably as The Mother, Magda El Khatib as The Sister, and Magda Al Sabahi as Magda, whose presence deepens the film’s examination of family dynamics and reputation in a culturally charged society. The film’s dreamlike structure and unflinching scrutiny of personal and political history invite viewers to consider how art, memory, and family impulses intersect in a life lived under public gaze.