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Tribute to Taoufik Salah

The path of crazy people ( Egypt 1955 )

Color: 90’

Direction: Tawfik Salah

Screenplay: Tawfik Salah

Director of Photography: Abdel Aziz Fahmi

Music: Abdel Aziz Fahmi Mohamed

Editing: Saïd Cheïkh

Cast: Berlinty Abdel Hamid – Chokri Sarhane – Hassan Baroudi – Abdel Ghani Kamar

Production: Najah Films

Synopsis

In a popular neighborhood, two young lovers are preparing for marriage. But because of the lack of resources, each one of them saves money in order to make the party. One day, the young man buys a lottery ticket and tells his fiancée. The father of the latter throws it saying that it’s because lottery is forbidden. One day a shepherd picks up the note and discovers that he is the winner. the whole village heard about the news ...

Réalisateur

Tawfik Salah was born in 1926 in Alexandria. He graduated in 1949 in English literature and was trained in cinema in Paris until 1951. Tawfik Saleh’s oeuvre is the only one in Egyptian cinema which may be considered purely "Third Worldist". All his films deal with social injustice, underdevelopment, political abuse and the class struggle. His first film, Darb al-mahabil (1955), co-written by Naguib Mahfouz, was set in a popular neighborhood but represented a kind of allegory of greed and materialism. It took Saleh another seven years to direct his Sira’ al-abtal (1962), set during the cholera epidemic of the 1930s. It featured Shukry Sarhan as a leftist country doctor who battles not only against the disease, but also against the peasant’s ignorance. His Yaumiyat na’ib fi-l-aryaf (1968), taken from ’Taufiq al-Hakim’’s novel, counts among the best adaptations. Yet he often came up against censorship and bureaucracy. Al-moutamarridoune (1968) and Al-sayyid bulti(1967), both had to wait two years until their release. Finally, in the early 70s, Saleh left the country. His Al-makhdu’un (1973) adapted from Ghassan Kanafani’s novel "Men Under the Sun", was one of the first Arab films to move away from a melodramatic approach to the Palestinian question and to express scepticism regarding pan-Arab solidarity. Saleh’s last feature Al-ayyam al-tawila (1980) was produced by the Iraqi Theatre and Film Organization. Saleh, who had moved to Iraq in 1973 in order to teach cinema, returned to Egypt in the mid-1980s to teach at the Higher Film Institute.