Naguib Mahfouz

A documentary directed by Anne Lainé.

Synopsis

When he con­fides him­self to the film’s direc­tor, Naguib Mah­fouz, father of the Arab novel, per­haps the most noto­ri­ous man in Egypt, is still in shock from the 1994 attack by fun­da­men­tal­ists which nearly took his life. Left near blind and deaf by the assault, he read­ies him­self to defend his ideal of free­dom and defy the fatwa launched against him in 1988, at the time of his win­ning the Nobel Price: “I have gone beyond the point where my life is lost” he states before break­ing into laugh­ter. This warm por­trayal depicts the engaged works of a man imbued with the spirit of free­dom and tol­er­ance. The Arab world’s only lit­er­ary Nobel Price, bureau­crat by day and writer by night, has drawn his imag­i­na­tion from the old Islamic Cairo of his child­hood. His first sen­sual expe­ri­ences drove him to build a world of words using the body as pri­mary mate­r­ial. Auda­cious author, dis­crete man, he has cre­ated a colos­sal body of work which ren­ders him one of the incon­testable giants of 20th cen­tury literature.