Egyptian Director Marwan Hamed on Portraying the Arab World’s Greatest 20th-Century Performer Umm Kulthum and Why She’s Still ‘Influential’ (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comNick Vivarelli International Correspondent Prominent Egyptian director Marwan Hamed, best known internationally for groundbreaking epic “The Yacoubian Building,” more recently shot “El Set,” a biopic of Egyptian icon Umm Kulthum, who is considered the Arab world’s greatest singer.
Kulthum has also been praised by Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, among other Western artists, and sampled by Beyonce and Shakira.
Hamed’s new Arabic blockbuster with international ambitions, now in post, features Egyptian star Mona Zaki playing the vocalist born in the Nile delta village of Tamay al‐Zahirah, who from the late 1920s onwards became the first Arab singer to disseminate her work to the masses via the new technologies of the times: radio, the phonograph, cinema and television.
In the process, Kulthum recorded some 300 songs over a 60-year career, while conquering millions of fans and disrupting gender norms with her powerful, often politically charged, music.
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