\tProminent Egyptian director Marwan Hamed, best known internationally for groundbreaking epic \u201cThe Yacoubian Building,\u201d more recently shot \u201cEl Set,\u201d a biopic of Egyptian icon Umm Kulthum,\u00a0who is considered the Arab world\u2019s greatest singer.<\/p>\n
\tKulthum has also been praised by Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin\u2019s Robert Plant, among other Western artists, and sampled by Beyonce and Shakira.<\/p>\n
\tHamed\u2019s 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\u2010Zahirah,\u00a0who 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. \t<\/p>\n
\tIn the process, Kulthum recorded some 300 songs over a 60-year career,\u00a0while conquering millions of fans and disrupting gender norms with her powerful, often politically charged, music. <\/p>\n
\t\t\t \t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t \t \t\t \t \tA sneak 18-minute peek of footage from \u201cEl Set\u201d \u2013 which is co-produced by Egypt\u2019s Synergy Films, Film Square and Film Clinic, and by Saudi Arabian film fund Big Time Investment \u2013 will be unveiled during the upcoming Atlas Workshops held during Morocco\u2019s Marrakech Festival, which opens today.<\/p>\n
\tVariety spoke to Hamed about what\u00a0Kulthum stands for beyond her superb singing and why she is still very timely and relevant today.<\/p>\n
\tUmm Kulthum obviously is the Arab world\u2019s greatest singer. But she also carries a lot of symbolic significance. She\u2019s a Muslim woman artist who was able to transcend all sexual, religious, political and national barriers. Talk to me about what aspects of her story and personality \u201cEl Set\u201d delves into?<\/p>\n
\tThe most interesting thing in the film is basically: How did this little girl who used to dress as a boy in a very poor village become this icon? That is the main aspect. It\u2019s not only about her success in music, but also: How did she become a female icon? That is really what the film is about. Her transformation and her struggle with society and how she changed the way she was perceived, until she rises, and her nickname in the Arab world becomes El Set, which means \u201cThe Lady.\u201d That is why we chose \u201cEl Set\u201d as the film\u2019s title. It\u2019s her moniker in the Arab world. But at the same time, it really represents her journey. In doing our research we realized that \u2013 wow \u2013 she did amazing stuff! \t<\/p>\n
\tWhat are some of the most significant facets of Umm Kulthum\u2019s journey?<\/p>\n
\tFor example, she was one of the first women to get elected in the [Arab] musician\u2019s syndicate. She won that battle, and that was something that wasn\u2019t common at the time, in the mid-40s. She also really defied society when it comes to marriage and family, and all this tradition of the pressure that society puts on a woman, and this kind of \u2013 how can I call it \u2013 struggle between career and family. What\u2019s amazing about her is that she made her own choices. The ones she believed in. Regardless of what anyone else thought she should do. This is very important, and is, I think, the most powerful thing she did. She made her own choices, and achieved that in a society that did not live that way. Whether that was the society of her village or the monarchy, or the post-revolution, post-1952, Egypt.<\/p>\n
\tTell me more about the film\u2019s female empowerment elements<\/p>\n
\tI mean, she had her moments at every twist and turn of the societal changes of that time. At the same time, she exerted lots of political influence. When you look at her story today \u2013 and put it in the context of today\u2019s world \u2013 there are a lot of parallels you can make. That is what is so interesting about her story, that you can really correlate it to the present. So, basically the narrative follows this in a way, in a bit of a non-linear manner.<\/p>\n
\tWhat about Umm Kulthum\u2019s personality?<\/p>\n
\tWe\u2019ve explored her inner fears, because this is something that she and a lot of other people have spoken about. Many people have this far-removed impression of her because she\u2019s always shot in long shots from afar on stage, projecting a certain [distanced] image that she intentionally tried to maintain. But the film is also a great opportunity to delve into her inner fears, because she wasn\u2019t a superwoman. She had her fears and to achieve what she did, it wasn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n
\tTalk to me about working with Mona Zaki who of course is coming off the recent success of female empowerment thriller \u201cFlight 404,\u201d which is Egypt\u2019s Oscar contender and has travelled outside the region.<\/p>\n
\tThis is a very demanding role that needed someone with Mona\u2019s abilities. She puts in a tour de force performance that I think will have a very strong emotional impact on audience. In terms of prep, for an entire year Mona went through singing lessons, movement lessons, dialect coaching, and lots of makeup rehearsals. She had to sit in the [makeup] chair for six hours every day before the cameras rolled. It\u2019s a very demanding role because you are not just focusing on one period of Umm Kulthum\u2019s life, you are jumping back and forth between lots of different moments. That in itself is very demanding, because Umm Kulthum changes a lot. When you really break down this character, it\u2019s not just one character, because the changes she goes through are huge. Mona gave it everything, gave it so much hard work, and I really think that the end result is going to have a powerful resonance. \t<\/p>\n
\tThere is a pan-Arabic element to the film, of course. But Umm Kulthum had fans all over the world. How is this depicted in the film?<\/p>\n
\tIn 1967,\u00a0Umm Kulthum\u00a0held her only performance in Europe at the Olympia Theatre\u00a0in\u00a0Paris. In the film we see her at the age of 70 performing in Paris in front of a massive crowd. It was a very heated political moment, after the 1967 [Arab-Israeli] war. And this tells you how influential she was. I always think about that moment: the war had taken place in June, and there she was in November, performing in Europe at a rather old age. This really tells you how influential and how powerful she was. And still is.<\/p>\n
\tBelow: a first look image of \u201cEl Set\u201d<\/p>\n
\t \t\t\t \t\t\t \t \t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy \t\t \t \t\t\t <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Prominent Egyptian director Marwan Hamed, best known internationally for groundbreaking epic \u201cThe Yacoubian Building,\u201d more recently shot \u201cEl Set,\u201d a biopic of Egyptian icon Umm Kulthum,\u00a0who is considered the Arab world\u2019s greatest singer. Kulthum has also been praised by Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin\u2019s Robert Plant, among other Western artists, and sampled by Beyonce and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19631,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}