The Yacoubian Building February 5, 2010

This series is free and open to the public. All films are shown in Jepson Hall 118 unless otherwise noted. Friday showings are at 3:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and Sunday showings are at 7:30 p.m. The films are shown in the original language with English subtitles. For more information, please contact Paul Portefield.

The Yacoubian Building

February 5 & 7
Egypt, 2006
Directed by Marwan Hamed
172 minutes (No MPAA rating)

Based on the best selling Egyptian novel of the same name, The Yacoubian Building is a bold and impressive drama that charts the modern experiences of the characters that live in The Yacoubian, an Art Deco luxury apartment building in downtown Cairo that actually exists. With its public reputation for refinement and sophistication still intact, the interior of the building is beginning to show signs of decay in both décor and inhabitants. Director Marwan Hamed uses the building as not only a unifying location in which the main characters live but also as a metaphor for the state of contemporary Egypt. Zaki Pasha (Adel Imam), a wealthy and educated engineer, maintains an apartment in The Yacoubian and also an office for his many trysts. Haj Azzam (Nour El Sherif) is a self-proclaimed religious man who in private uses his self-made fortune to buy political influence and women. A publicly respected editor of local newspaper, Hatem Rasheed (Khaled El Sawy), is harboring the secret that he is romantically involved with a young male soldier. And Zaki’s housekeeper, Bosnaina, who lives in one of the rooftop apartment conversions, is tiring of her boyfriend’s troubling interesting in Muslim extremism. While The Yacoubian Building garnered interest over having the highest budget for an Egyptian film, box office records were broken throughout the Middle East as the film received a vast amount of publicity, both for and against the movie, due to the inclusion of controversial subjects such as homosexuality, institutional corruption and feminism. The Yacoubian Building premiered at the Berlin Film festival in 2006 and was Egypt’s official submission to the 79th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

Official Website: http://library.richmond.edu/mrc/international-film-series.html