Mohamed Diab via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Mohamed Diab:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Mohamed Diab
- City: Cairo
- Country: Egypt
- Hometown: Ismailia, Egypt
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Mohamed Diab is an award-winning writer and director whose work is often centered on pressing issues concerning Egyptian society.
He's known for his directorial debut film Cairo 678 (Les Femmes du bus 678), which was released a month before the Egyptian revolution and was deemed by the New York Times "unmistakably a harbinger of that revolution."
Diab wrote the blockbuster Egyptian franchise El Gezira (The Island) films which are considered the highest grossing Egyptian and Arabic films of all times. These films revolve around a tyrannical drug lord on an island in Upper Egypt. El Gezira is often quoted and referenced in Egyptian pop culture and was also the 2007 Egyptian nomination for the Academy Awards.
After being heavily involved in the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Diab wanted to make a film about it. It took 4 years to develop Eshtebak (Clash) which initially was a film about the rise of the revolution but which ended up being a film that captures the fall of the revolution. The film is set in the violent aftermath of the ouster of president Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood party. Violent clashes had erupted all over Egypt between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and military supporters.
The entire film was shot from within the confines of a police riot truck. Thematically, the film explores the human condition and the roots of terrorism.
The film is a recipient of grants and funding from the San Francisco Film Society, CNC l'aide au Cinémas du Monde and Arte France.
Eshtebak (Clash) was officially selected for the Un Certain Regard category of the Cannes Film Festival 2016.
Besides filmmaking, Diab is known for his vocal participation in the 2011 Egyptian revolution, which earned him a Webby Award. His role in the revolution is chronicled in the Amazon best-selling book "Rising From Tahrir."
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Watch my Films: http://www.amazon.com/prime-video/actor/Mohamed-Diab/nm2559996/
- ▶ Article: http://filmint.nu/stereotypes-interview-director/
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
