Sundance ’20: Luxor

February 6, 2020Posted in2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Egypt, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Sundance, UK

Sundance20luxor

***/****
starring Andrea Riseborough, Karim Saleh, Michael Landes, Sherine Reda
written and directed by Zeina Durra

by Walter Chaw In Zeina Durra’s Luxor, Andrea Riseborough plays Hana, a British surgeon in Luxor, Egypt on a short leave between horrific assignments first in devastated Syria, then in Yemen. She’s shell-shocked, it’s clear. She spends her days wandering through the ancient city and allows herself one night to be picked up in her hotel’s bar by an unctuous Yank throwing his money around. She lies in her hotel room for hours, trying to nap, and when she does sleep, she wakes to find herself another day closer to some sort of hell. Durra captures her listlessness as a feeling ineffable of being lost but never lost enough. Hana sits by herself at the far left end of a park bench, arms folded across her chest and a baseball cap pulled down low over her stunned expression. She visits a pyramid one day, just another tourist, and overhears a tour guide giving the yokels a taste of the gravid mysticism they’re paying for. It all lands as empty for Hana. Hana, who doesn’t have anything left inside after all this time bearing witness to the absence of God.

There’s Only One Sharif in This Town: FFC Interviews Omar Sharif

September 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Egypt, Film Festivals, Interviews, TIFF

OmarshariftitleSeptember 7, 2003|He made one of the cinema's greatest (and lengthiest) entrances in Lawrence of Arabia, appearing as a heat-obscured speck of dust that gradually adopts the form of a black-swathed man on horseback, one Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish. Omar Sharif's regal stride into our appointed meeting place, a third-floor room within Toronto's Hotel Intercontinental, felt almost as dramatic to me, for his every step is weighted with a half-century of fame. Mr. Sharif is at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting a delicate French film in which he stars opposite young Pierre Boulanger, François Dupeyron's Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran. The picture works largely because of the legend-in-his-own-time baggage the actor brings to the title role of a neighbourhood grocer yearning to pass his considerable wisdom on. When I interviewed him, Mr. Sharif was, like his alter ego Ibrahim, pensive and forthcoming, with little patience for subtext. I found him both gracious and melancholy, and was heartbroken when our all-too-brief time together ran out.