Ala Younis
In the 1960s, Gamal Abdel Nasser hinted that ‘al-magnon’ [the madman] Youssef Chahine should return to make films in UAR. Chahine returned and was commissioned to direct the first UAR-USSR co-production: a seventy-millimetre colour Cinemascope feature film on the High Dam project in Aswan. To translate the UAR and USSR visions, Chahine made not one but two films. “The People and the Nile” was shot as the building works were taking place. When the film edit was finished in 1968, it was rejected, and Chahine had to readapt his work to be approved as a new film that was released in 1972.
Chahine’s films were lost and resurrected twice. In the 1990s, Chahine said he was happy that, in the process of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, he could say “without fear” that he “stole a copy” of the first version. “And I do hope that this copy, my original copy, survives, with all its details, […] I don’t think the Soviets are going to care at this stage with all what is happening there, I even wish they lose the negatives.”
Sonallah Ibrahim wrote Star of August (1973) novel based on the true(r) chronicles of his and two colleagues’ trip to the high dam site in 1966, and after he jointly published a dense state propaganda reportage, The Man of the High Dam (1967), that was highly allegorical, mystified and uninformative of the work hardships.
Elements from the reverse paths of two creative works by the same author on the High Dam offer an insight on the processes that governed the politics of the era, particularly the propaganda apparatus of the UAR and USSR governments, each state’s proposals for utopia through their ideologies, and the statements, tricks and manoeuvres Chahine resorted to when his work did not fit its commissioners’ vision. This presentation investigates the disruption of the original film and the subsequent comparisons offered through clips from both films, as they were finally made available online.