The Cinematheque

“Chahine strides into Douglas Sirk territory, and immediately begins using the whole Sirkian rhetoric of mirrors, frames-within-frames, and ominous colour overlays—this, nearly ten years before any comparable critical assessment of Sirk’s style appeared in print.”

Dave Kehr, Film Comment

Youssef Chahine portrays people at an epic scale, regardless of class or historical significance. Dawn of a New Day, his second film in colour and possibly the most exactingly photographed one of his career, is centred on Naila (Sanaa Gamil), a fortysomething socialite married to an ungenerous husband (played by Chahine). Intrusions into their social bubble alter our perspective and open up the film’s genre register. If at first we are somewhere close to Antonioni and his ensnaring compositions, the presence of Naila’s journalist brother as well as a prodigious and attractive college student half Naila’s age push the film toward the social realism of post-revolution Cairo and the emotional heights of melodrama. The May–December romance suggests Sirk, and reference is made to Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, but the narrative details are also personal to Chahine. The ornate cinematography is by Abdel Aziz Fahmy (The Night of Counting the Years).

In Arabic with English subtitles

“An undervalued work … An example of Chahine’s sense for human sensibilities in the mirror of societal and political developments.”

Arsenal Filminstitut

“I count [Dawn of a New Day] among my best films and still stand by it completely … It is about the class whose assets were nationalized after the 1952 revolution [and] whether or not this class still had a place in Egyptian society.”

Youssef Chahine