Attiyat Al-Abnoudi was an Egyptian film director and writer. Born in 1939 in a village in the Nile Delta, she studied Law and Cinema in Cairo.
She moved to the International Film and Television School in Britain. She specialized in documentary films, especially on Egyptian society and women's issues.
In 1971, her first work Horse of Mud won the Grand Prize at the Kelibia Festival for Amateur Cinema in Tunisia, and several awards.
In 1985, she was selected from among six international film-makers to produce a film funded by the World Conference on Women in Nairobi.
Internationally she received Best Educational Film for Permissible Dreams at the Mannheim Festival, Germany, 1983, and Best Joint Production for Rhythm of Life in Spain, 1990.
Her last work was the documentary Made in Egypt (2006).

Farouk Beloufa, an Algerian film-maker, studied film at PINC Algeria and then at IDHEC in Paris and took courses at EPHE in Paris under the direction of Roland Barthes.

He presented a thesis on Film Theory. His first institutional commission Insurrectionnelle, a montage of archives from the Algerian War, was refused and then screened after being revised without his permission.
Nahla is his onlyfeature film.

Jameel Rateb was born in 1926 in Alexandria. He made his debut in Egypt with the film I'm the East (1946).
He made over 70 Egyptian, and 7 French, films. He also participated in the famous American film Lawrence of Arabia.

He acted in 3 Tunisian films, including Chichkhan, directed by Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud and Fadhel Ja'aibi.
In 2016, he was the guest of onour at the 27th Carthage Film Festival.

Born in Burkina Faso, he graduated in Cinema at the INAFEC, Ouagadougou, and the IDHEC, Paris in 1985.

He made several short documentaries, including Les Ecuelles (1983) and Ouagadougou, Ouaga deux roues (1985), and in all some 40 films. His first short film was Poko (1981) and his first feature film Le Choix (1986, many awards), then Yaaba (1989) and Tilai (1990, Grand Prix at Cannes, Fespaco Grand Prix). Samba Traore (1993) won Silver Bear at Berlin. He died in 2018.

Born in 1934 in Soliman, self-taught, he has since the 1960s produced and directed with his association Essor par le Théâtre et le Cinéma and then with his company Les Films Omar Khlifi several short, mid-length and feature films.

In 1966 he directed the first Tunisian feature fiction, El Fajr (Dawn).

He was a Tunisian director whose short film My Village, A Village Among So Many Others won the Golden Tanit at the 1972 JCC.

He wrote and directed films such as The Shadow of the Earth, Layla Ma Raison, Noce de lune, La danse du vent, L’enfant du soleil and La Rumeur de l’eau.