Shadi Abdel Salam (Arabic: Shadi ʿAbd al-Salam) (b. March 15, 1930, Alexandria, Egypt - d. October 8, 1986, Cairo, Egypt) was an Egyptian film director, screenwriter and costume and set designer.
Born in Alexandria on March 15, 1930, Shadi graduated from Victoria College, Alexandria, in 1948, and then moved to England to study theater arts from 1949 to 1950. Shadi then joined the faculty of fine arts in Cairo where he graduated as an architect in 1955. He worked as assistant to the artistic architect, Ramsis W. Wassef in 1957, and designed the decorations and costumes of some of the most famous historical Egyptian films such as Wa Islamah, Maww'ed fil Bourg, Al Nasser Salah Ad-Din, and Almaz wa Abdu El Hamouly. Shadi also worked as a historical consultant and supervisor of the decoration, costumes and accessories sections of the Polish film, Pharaoh, directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz.
Shadi is best known for directing the long drama film entitled The Night of Counting the Years (also known as The Mummy - Al-Momiaa), 1968–1969. Shadi received many film accolades for this work and The Night of Counting the Years has been named the third best Egyptian film on the list of the 100 Greatest Egyptian films.
Shadi also directed the Ancient Egyptian short drama film entitled The Eloquent Peasant. Notably, Shadi once worked as the Director of the Ministry of Culture Center for experimental films in 1970. He also wrote the scenario of the long drama film entitled "Ikhnatoun" and finalized the relevant designs from 1974–1985.
Shadi taught at the Cinema Higher Institute of Egypt in the Departments of Decorations, Costumes and Film Direction from 1963–1969.
Shadi died on October 8, 1986, in Cairo, Egypt.
*****
The Night of Counting the Years was released in 1969. The story is based upon the true story of the discovery of 40 Royal Mummies in 1881 in Thebes, the capital of the Pharaonic Empire. In the movie, for over three thousand years, the mummies had lain undisturbed, until some archaeologists from the Antiquities Department in Cairo noticed that several objects bearing royal names from the 21st dynasty were constantly appearing on the antique black market. They surmised that somewhere in Thebes, someone knows the location of the missing tombs. It happened that this secret had been kept from generation to generation by the chief's descendants among the Horabat mountain tribe. These people had always considered the Royal Cache to be a private source of income on which to draw at times of need. The money had then been divided among the members of the tribe. When the archaeologists arrived to find the tombs, the two sons of the dead tribal chief are thrown into moral chaos, not knowing whether to reveal the secret or preserve what the tribesmen consider to be their natural heritage. The younger son, Waniss, becomes the central figure in the story film.
The Night of Counting the Years, also released in Arabic as The Mummy (Arabic: Al-Mummia), is a 1969 Egyptian film and the only feature film directed by Shadi Abdel Salam. The film was selected as the Egyptian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 43rd Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. It is ranked as 3rd on the list of Top 100 Egyptian Films.
The Night of Counting the Years remains one of the best examples of neo-realism in Egyptian cinema. Other notable examples include Youssef Chahine's Al Ard (The Earth, 1968) and Al Usfur (The Sparrow, 1972) as well as Tewfik
Produced by Roberto Rossellini, who was instrumental in encouraging Abdel Salam to make the film, The Night of Counting the Years tells a story set among the grave robbers of Kurna in Upper Egypt.
Shadi Abdel Salam's The Mummy was the forerunner of what was to become the hallmark of the new realism, namely, the preoccupation with the search for identity and the relationship between heritage and character.
The relationship between contemporary and Ancient Egypt is dealt with allegorically in the film. The static images of landscape and the rigid expressions of the main characters reflect those of the statues and reliefs found in Ancient Egypt. The use of classical Arabic, not Egyptian dialect which is normally used in Egyptian cinema, reinforces the impression of monumentalism.
The unrestrained sacking of the tombs is represented as a danger, threatening moral decline by inviting greed and sex to undermine the dignity of the tribe and its traditions, replacing the order of the world with chaos.
Shadi Abdel Salam has said that his task was to remind Egyptians of their own history: "I think that the people of my country are ignorant of our history and I feel that it is my mission to make them know some of it. I regard cinema not as a consumerist art, but as a historical document for the next generations."
Although he went on to direct short fiction and documentaries, The Night of Counting the Years remains Abdel Salam's only full length feature film. This film is set in 1881, when Egypt was under the failing rule of the Ottoman Khedives, themselves overseen by the Anglo-French Caisse de la Dette, and a year before the start of British colonial rule. The film is based on the true story of the Abd el-Rassuls, an Upper-Egyptian clan that is stealing piecemeal a cache of mummies they have discovered at a tomb (known to modern Egyptologists as DB320) near the village of Kurna, and selling the artifacts on the black market.
The film begins with Wanis (Ahmed Marei) and his older brother (Ahmed Hegazy) watching the funeral of their father Selim. The brothers have become the heads of the Horabat tribe, and their uncle shows them its dark secret – the tribe has been living off the treasures of the ancient pharaohs buried in tombs within the mountain on which they live. The brothers are shocked on seeing their uncle beheading a mummy to obtain a gold necklace. They feel their life is built on a lie. The older brother complains to the family, who kill him and throw his body into the Nile. The secret thus falls solely onto the shoulders of Wanis, who struggles to reconcile his conscience with his loyalty to his people.
The city people (effendis), wealthy Egyptian archeologists, come - unusually in the hot summer - to try to identify the source of unexplained artifacts which have been found on the black market, following a meeting with French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero. The trading has been led by Ayoub (Shafiq Noureddin), via Murad (Mohamed Babih), who also runs a brothel.
Wanis tells Ayoub that the tribe will not trade with him again. Murad then tells Wanis that his uncle arranged for his brother to be killed. Murad says that Ayoub has sent him to repair the relationship with Wanis and acquire the remaining treasure. Wanis refuses, and walks to the steamboat carrying the effendi leadership. A team of archaeologists and soldiers are sent to the tomb, and the tomb is emptied of all the sarcophagi, which are loaded onto the boat.
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*****
Abu Dhabi Film Festival 2010: Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy
You can assess a film festival’s attitude on cinema by its repertory choices.
You can assess a film festival’s attitude on cinema by its repertory choices. Sundance, which very briefly nods toward past independent cinema while unfurling new work, pushes film as progressive-transgressive; New York, with generous repertory sidebars and special events, presents film as an art form in need of historical contextualization and appreciation; Cannes premieres glamorous new restorations as part of its party scene. I’m increasingly sensing that Abu Dhabi is a sampler festival: a Hollywood visit (Secretariat), some European fun (Potiche, Carlos), political and environmental documentaries (the What in the World Are We Doing to Our World? sidebar), shorts both international and local.
Many of the ADFF’s films have come pretested at other festivals, as I’ve noted, though the lineup also offers several world premieres. It seems like the festival is trying to appeal to as many different kinds of moviegoers as possible, perhaps in keeping with the multi-interest, multi-ethnic, multi-origin, multinational crowd of press and industry reps, filmmakers, and casual filmgoers attending. The repertory programming also offers a few choice selections—some films from an upcoming Museum of Modern Art show of Arab cinema, and high-profile restorations of Metropolis, The Circus, and the 1969 Egyptian film The Mummy (a.k.a. The Night of Counting the Years).
The Mummy restoration, which premiered at Cannes and also played at the New York Film Festival, is showing in both the restoration sidebar and as a part of the MoMA program. Long considered one of the greatest Egyptian films, the piece’s making often gets as much coverage as the movie does. The director, a former costume and set designer named Shadi Abdel-Salam, earned production money from European investors with Italian neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini’s help. The restoration, supervised by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation at the Cineteca di Bologna, has repeated history; foreign efforts have helped bring an Egyptian film to life.
It’s appropriate to discuss The Mummy’s production and restoration circumstances, since the movie’s great theme is Egypt’s struggle to reclaim itself. The film suggests this by opening with a scene of men in black suits and red fezzes sitting around a dark table discussing the ancient Book of the Dead. “Any soul that lacks a name,” we’re told, “wanders in endless toil.”
The movie’s based on a real 1880s discovery of over 40 mummies, but its mission seems to be to uncover Egypt. The actors all speak in classical Arabic, yet you remember images more than sounds. The movie quickly leaves dark rooms to show some of the most lavish, richest light ever photographed on bright purple flowers, sparkling water, and glowing skin. Terrain and air grow more beautiful than the most splendid sarcophagi, and you feel the film forgetting plot for stretches so that it can record the environment. As characters hunt the sort of art that’s ended up in the Louvre, the film itself seeks natural treasures.
“My cause is our lost or missing history,” Abdeh-Salam said. He was speaking about material artifacts, but he also could have been addressing cinema, which by preserving the present becomes a record of the past. (His subsequent career was a missing history; he died before he could finish his second feature.) People watch DVDs the world over, but the decline of repertory film screenings—and work like The Mummy can only be properly grasped on film—does seem like spreading amnesia.
I watched The Mummy in a quarter-full house, and not at the mall, but at the Abu Dhabi Theater, a generally exclusive venue that’s open to the public now because the festival rented it. Residents can watch non-Hollywood films most of the year here, but if there’s a repertory tradition, I haven’t found it. You can’t accuse locals of ignoring their Middle Eastern heritage by choosing to see The Expendables over The Mummy because (a) a lot of the locals aren’t from the Middle East, and (b) it’s much less familiar, perhaps even unknown to many who are, just as many American audiences wouldn’t recognize Gary Cooper. But there’s a current issue of representation here, as well as a historical one. A high number of films featuring minority filmmakers and characters open in America in art houses that their target audiences visit infrequently; similarly, though television programming offers a range of Arab news, sports, music videos, film, and even poetry, it’s possible for Abu Dhabi audiences to frequent cinemas without seeing Arabs command the screen.
The Mummy therefore should play in two programs at this festival, since it’s both a classic film and a classic Arab film. You sense that the festival heads (many of whom are not Arab) are attempting to import history into the area, and will continue to do so; festival head Peter Scarlet announced before the screening that next year’s lineup will feature the complete film work of Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s too early to tell whether these efforts will register as more than well-meant paternalism, but they’re valuable. After all, the best movies usually weren’t shot last year. Film festivals should program repertory too.
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