EGYPT: Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine has been awarded the French Legion of Honor for lifetime achievement

The French government has awarded veteran Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine the Legion of Honour, one of France's highest honours, for his artistic lifetime achievement. Chahine was presented with the medal at a ceremony at the French embassy in Cairo on Thursday (November 16), because ill health prevented the 79 year old auteur from travelling to Paris to receive La Legion D'Honneur Au Grade D'Officier (Legion of Honour at the Level of Commander) in person from French President Jacques Chirac. The French-speaking Egyptian director, whose wife is French, has long been culturally close to France, and received the award in part for what the Chirac said were his efforts to foster French-Arab relations. At the ceremony, attended by many of Egypt's most famous actors and artists and former Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Maher, Chahine said he was pleased to receive one of France's highest honours. "Of course this is the highest honour given by France," he said. "It is usually granted only to the French themselves, and very seldom even to them. There are some people that inspired me to remember them and love them more because I have loved them from a long time, more than 50 years. I got married to my French wife 50 years ago," he added. Chahine has directed more than 40 films, a number of them overtly political. The director of such classics as "Bab al-Hadid" (after a Cairo Station called "Iron Door") and "al-Nasser Salah al-Din" (Saladin the Victorious) has been a highly vocal critic of the governments of long-time Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak as well as the Islamic extremists who have opposed Mubarak. On Saturday (November 18), Chahine was scheduled to begin filming his latest project "Heyya Fawda" ("It's Chaos"), which tackles the political climate prevalent in Egypt over the past few years, particularly since the holding of the first multi-candidate presidential elections in 2005 and the 2006 general elections, which saw harsh government crackdown on opposition parties and Brotherhood candidates. Chahine's work has frequently been critical of Islamic extremism. In Chahine's last film, "Alexandria New York", released in 2004, the director turned his camera on the United States, portraying what he saw as political fanaticism and media bias fuelling hatred of Arabs. In "Alexandria New York", in which a New York ballet dancer discovers that his father is Egyptian, Chahine dealt with the clash between his love for America, where he once studied, and his anger at what he views as Washington's unswerving support for Israel at the Arabs' expense. Chahine also criticized U.S. foreign policy in a short 2002 film to mark the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Chahine's first autobiographic movie, "Alexandria Why?," produced in 1978, won the Berlin Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize. He was also awarded a prize for his life's work at the 1997 Cannes film festival. One of Chahine's contemporaries, Egyptian actor Gameel Ratib, who has performed in plays on the French theatre, said that Chahine was well deserving of the Legion of Honour. "Youssef Chahine is one of the greatest directors around the world, not only in Egypt," said Ratib. "He has been honoured in the Cannes festival, and this is the most important international festival. And he is considered one of the greatest directors in cinema history and this is an honour for all Egyptians," he added. Chahine is from the Mediterranean city of Alexandria on Egypt's northern coast. He studied at the Pasadena Playhouse, a U.S. drama school, in the 1940s. His exposure to American films, musicals and music would shape his own movies, which earned him a reputation as one of the most intelligent directors in Arab cinema. Egyptian actress Hala Sidki said that France's reputation as a champion of the arts made the award to Chahine all the more significant. "That an Arab artist is being honoured by a big country like France, and France is well known for being a country of art and artists, and elevated aesthetic taste," she said. "So a country like that, when it honours Youssef Chahine, and in addition to that when the honour comes from the French President, that is not an everyday honour. Also the ceremony, if it had been in France it might have been even bigger, bigger than this. But anyway it is good that the honouring had taken place here so Youssef Chahine is among us," she added. Chahine was pursued by fundamentalist Muslim lawyers through the Egyptian courts for his depiction of the prophet Joseph in his 1994 film "The Emigrant." He then went on an offensive against political Islam in his next two films, "Destiny" and "The Other," which showed Islamism as a destructive and reactionary force. Some criticized the movies for their simplistic portrayal of the trend. Chahine made the films at the end of the 1990s, during which militant Islamists aiming to set up a strict Islamic order had waged a bloody uprising in Egypt. Because of his international recognition, Chahine has said his films have mostly avoided being cut by state censors, who he says are ever present on film sets. But he has complained that his work has not been shown enough on state television.

ITN Source | November 19, 2006

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