Alexandria played a pioneering role in the establishment of the Egyptian cinema industry. Its early cinematographers were amateurs who experimented with this new form of art, and who were scriptwriters, directors of photography, actors and producers all in one. The first studios and films were Alexandrian, and Alexandrian by definition was a mixture of foreigners resident in Alexandria and Egyptians. As the art and the industry flourished, cinema makers gradually moved to Cairo where there was a larger audience, and where the newly created Studio Misr provided sophisticated equipment. Now, a hundred years later, AlexCinema explores the history of the birth of the seventh art in Alexandria, and the attempt to revive the art of film making in the city of its birth.
Photographs, posters and pressbooks courtesy of Dawlat Bayoumi, Mohamed Awad and Makram Salama. Greek films courtesy of the Embassy of Greece in Cairo.
