The Cinematheque

“Masterful composition … The Land [is] a tale both specific to a certain time and place in Egyptian history and yet strangely universal … The film hasn’t lost any of its revolutionary charge.”

David Heslin, Senses of Cinema

“It took until ​’67 for me to truly become politicized,” said Youssef Chahine, referring to the Six Day War, or the Naksa, after which he made a series of films that would become known as his ​“trilogy of defeat.” The Land, considered one of the greatest Egyptian films of all time, directly engages with the formal strategies of Soviet cinema—Chahine having previously made The Nile and the People, a Soviet–Egyptian production with an ambitiously structured network of characters. That narrative strategy is revised here to focus on a collective group of farmers. No individual is privileged above another, with the possible exception of Wasifa, who moves through her village with proto-feminist agency but is also the first to commit an ethically compromised act. When the village’s water supply is almost entirely shut off, courses of action, direct or passive, become serious life-or-death arguments. The film is set in the 1930s but is utterly contemporary and takes no easy shortcuts.

In Arabic with English subtitles

“A showcase for [Chahine’s] expansive, generous sensibility … He spins a vast web of episodes linked by complicated lines of cause and effect.”

Max Nelson, Film Comment

“Chahine’s film has extraordinary complexity … He is able to inspire, by showing the villagers standing side by side, but also that political oppression will not always unite the dispossessed.”

Leila Latif, BFI