Yousry Nasrallah

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Upon his return to Alexandria, Khaled becomes intrigued with a graffiti mural opposite his apartment. As he pursues this further, a larger underground arts scene slowly reveals itself, composed of musicians, filmmakers, and graffiti artists. As they struggle to get their voices heard, Khaled is compelled to help them acquire some much deserved visibility.

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After we last see him in "Alexandria, Why?" Egyptian filmmaker Yehia Mourad is in his thirties, and successful in his work, he has grown distant from his wife and children and suffers a symbolic blockage of the heart while shooting the final scenes of his latest film. After being flown to England for evaluation, it's determined that Yehia must undergo emergency surgery. Fact and fiction blend seamlessly—with healthy doses of cleverly absurdist fantasy—as the film explores the various personalities and forces that have made Yehia (and Youssef Chahine) the man he has become.

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After more than 20 years, Sue returns from Switzerland to her home country Egypt because her mother Fairouz is in a hospital bed. Sue ran away from the eccentric aristocrat as a young adult. Now she feels compelled to meet her again.

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Yehia runs a catering business with his sons, Ref’at and Galal; the former is engaged to marry Karima, who actually loves his brother and is trying to find a way to reveal her feelings for him; while he himself is in love with Shadia who just returned from the UAE, but fear the differences between them.

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Reem is a young political activist who works for an advertisement company. As she tries to uncover the truth behind the incide of the Battle of the Camel, she accompanies her friend Farah to Nazlet Al Seman where she meets and falls for Mahmoud, one of the people involved in the incident.

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10 filmmakers provide 10 separate stories focusing on the 18 days of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Ten stories they have experienced, heard, or imagined.

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Youssef is a hotshot anesthesiologist who often sleeps in his car for privacy. Laila is the careerist host of a late night radio call-in show. These two members of Cairo's elite, lost souls traveling parallel paths of longing and disconnection, are the principal fish in Yousry Nasrallah's The Aquarium, a meditation on the intellectual capital of the Middle East, now bent under the sway of repression in all its forms.

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Yousry Nasrallah's powerful adaptation of Lebanese writer Elias Khoury's epic novel of fifty years of Palestinian dispossession, exile, and resistance. The film follows the flight of Younes, his wife Nahila, and those around them, from their village in northern Palestine to a refugee camp in Lebanon. Some vow to continue the struggle, most simply struggle to survive. Unsparingly detailing the impact of the nakba (disaster) on Palestinian life and society and the refugees' often-contentious relationship with their reluctant Lebanese hosts, Gate of the Sun spans generations, mixing personal stories with historical events.

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Ali, an aspiring actor, works in a government-aided butchery and takes part in a cheap play. Defying his father's wishes, he moves to Paris to fulfill his dreams and starts living illegally alongside many other Arabs. Ali has a life-changing experience there that he won't fully remember until he returns to Egypt.

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Nubi, a wealthy man with Communist ties, sets out to find his half-brother Gamal, who has been disowned for being gay, to let him inherit his father's fortune. In the process, Nubi is supposed to kill Gamal's stepmother Raifa, a suspected drug dealer, before she can kill his half-brother.

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Set in 1987 against the backdrop of a hunger strike by the Egyptian film industry, Chahine himself steps in to play Yehia, the famed Egyptian director whose life is chronicled in "Alexandria, Why?" and "An Egyptian Story". Obsessed with Amr, the handsome actor he discovered and cast as his alter-ego in parts one and two of The Alexandria Trilogy, Yehia pressures Amr to star in various film projects that change even as Yehia's perception of the young actor begins to change. He first casts Amr as Hamlet, which the actor deems too demanding for his talents, then as the lead in a musical biopic of demigod Alexander the Great, who founded the city of Alexandria in 332 B.C.

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Set in the summer of 1961 during President Nasser's land reforms, this is a story of the childhood friendship between Yasser, the son of a bourgeois landowner, and Leil, the son of an Egyptian peasant. When turbulent times tear Yasser's family apart, the boys team up for a money-making scheme that results in misadventures.

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This big-budget historical epic from acclaimed Egyptian director Youssef Chahine features a crazed turn by Patrice Chereau as Napoleon Bonaparte. The film, an Egyptian-French co-production, deals with Napoleon's occupation of Alexandria and its effect on a typical Egyptian family. Michel Piccoli leads the cast as a general in Napoleon's army who tentatively befriends a local poet and falls in love with two young Egyptian brothers, reflecting complex themes of colonial desire, affection, and personal connection.

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In the mid-1990s, what did young Egyptians think of wearing the hijab? And of love? Where would their future lie, in their village or in Cairo? Yousry Nasrallah, one of the biggest names in Arab cinema, shows the diversity of their answers, from both male and female perspectives. The central figure is Bassem Samra, a 24-year-old teacher and aspiring actor in a film by Youssef Chahine. He holds lively conversations with friends, family and colleagues about their lives, with topics ranging from family pressure to get married to the complexities of dating in Arab society. The hijab turns out to mean something different to each of them—a means to be able to walk down the street undisturbed, an expression of faith. These relaxed, introspective discussions paint a varied picture of society that undermines many Western prejudices. What ultimately matters for these young people is to find their way in a world in which men and women receive mixed messages.

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