News

Danish TV hit “The Killing,” which was remade by AMC in the U.S., just got an Arabic adaptation on Dubai-based Mbc Group’s Shahid VIP streaming service.

The new Shahid original, which will drop today on Shahid and is titled “Monataf Khater,” shifts the setting from rainy Copenhagen to sunny Cairo. It is directed by Al Sadeer Al Massoud (“Qaid Majhol”) with Hossam Habbib serving as cinematographer.

The show’s lead actors are Bassel Khayat, Riham Abdel Ghafour (“Al Rahla”) and Bassem Samra.

The Arabic “The Killing” adaptation is produced by Charisma Pictures, the scripted productions division of Dubai-based Charisma Group which acquired the adaption rights from Dr Sales, the sales unit of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.

“We are delighted to have teamed up with Dr Drama and Charisma Pictures to create a new Arabic adaptation of the police procedural drama, with a fantastic cast and crew, led by director Al Sadeer Masoud.

Middle East and North Africa media and entertainment giant Mbc Group has announced an Arabic-language remake of the hit Danish police procedural The Killing.

The original Copenhagen-set show, produced by Danish state broadcaster Dr, sold to more than 120 territories and was nominated for multiple TV awards. The new version marks the first time a Nordic noir has been adapted for the Arabic market.

Locally titled as Monataf Khater, the remake is set in Cairo. The cast features Syrian, Egypt-based star Bassel Khayat, whose recent credits include the Netflix-acquired show Tango, alongside Egyptian stars Riham Abdel Ghafour and Bassem Samra. Mohamed El Masry wrote the series and Sadeer Al Massoud is the director.

“The Killing fast became a fan favorite and has gone on to earn a cult following across the world. We’re delighted to have teamed up with Dr Drama and Charisma Pictures to create a new Arabic...

Click here to read the full article.

The Killing, the Danish TV crime series that helped ignite the Nordic Noir genre, landed an array of international awards — including a BAFTA — and sparked a sharp rise in demand for Faroese sweaters as worn by Sofie Grabol’s Detective Sarah Lund, has been given an Arabic-language remake.

Titled Monataf Khater, the new adaptation is set to air on Shahid VIP, the subscription-based service of streaming platform Shahid of Saudi-owned Middle East broadcast giant Mbc, with the action shifting from gloomy Copenhagen to sunny Cairo in Egypt, where the series was also filmed. Charisma Pictures, the scripted division of Charisma Group, produced the project, having acquired the rights from Dr Sales. The series was written by Mohamed El Masry and directed by Sadeer Al Massoud (Qaid Majhol). Hossam Habib served as director of photography.

Leading the cast are Bassel Khayat (Al Arrab, Tango...

Yousry Nasrallah (pictured) is among Egypt’s most highly regarded filmmakers, known for depicting his country’s social and political complexities in multi-layered movies such as “Gate of the Sun” (2004), “Aquarium” (2008) and “After the Battle” (2012), a meditation on the Tahrir Square revolution.

He is now working on magical realism/coming-of-age drama “The Legend of Zeineb and Noah,” in which a 12-year-old Muslim girl named Zeineb, who strongly believes in many superstitions, steals her recently deceased mother’s corpse in order to delay the funeral.

Zeineb, who despite her young age is already engaged to an older man, escapes from her village in Upper Egypt with Noah, her 16-year-old Christian neighbor, embarking on a road trip in which they both confront many of the myths and fears they believed were true. The project is being unveiled at the Cairo Film Festival’s Cairo Film Connection co-production platform.

“What interested me most...

Yousry Nasrallah's Cannes offering is an act of defiance, a deeply political film shot amid hostility in Tahrir Square

The Egyptian film-maker Yousry Nasrallah and his cast withstood harassment and intimidation to bring their film to the screen. At one point, shooting in Tahrir Square amid the demonstrations of July 2011, the female cast members were attacked, and lead actor Menna Shalabi taunted as a "whore".

The producers even used a false title for the film to give the impression that they were shooting a romance, rather than use the real title – After the Battle – and betray the fact that they were making a film that, while fictional, was an on-the-spot, deeply political account of two people from opposite sides of society caught up in the Egyptian revolution.

But, said the director, the struggle to make the film was itself an act of defiance "in a context where cinema is being attacked as a sin,...

It appears that we’ve got our first dud of the fest in only day 2 by way of Yousry Nasrallah‘s After the Battle. While we can admire the quick shooting pace of the filmmaker (this is based on the events that occurred on Tahrir Square early in 2011) the film starring Nahed El Sebaï, Bassem Samra and Menna Shalabi failed to impress our panel. Baad el Mawkeaa is Nasrallah’s 9th feature film (8 works of fiction and one documentary) and this counts as his fourth visit to the Croisette. Click to enlarge!

Yousry Nasrallah's attempt to yoke a stolid, state-of-Egypt drama to the Arab spring is a long, hard trudge

Veteran director Yousry Nasrallah makes a melodrama out of a crisis in After the Battle, a film hewn from the headlines of the Egyptian revolution that crash-lands in the Cannes competition on the basis of its urgent topicality, a heart-on-sleeve narrative, and not a whole lot else. Try as I might, I can't see it troubling the judges.

Bassem Samra plays Mahmoud, an impoverished horseman cajoled into charging the Tahrir Square protesters by Hosni Mubarak's goons on the understanding that a stable regime will restore the tourist trade that provides for his family. Now Mahmoud's life is in tatters. Mubarak has gone and the military are in power. He is out of work, a hometown pariah, and his son is being bullied at school. "I can't even feed my horse because I am a horseman,...

Political debates can be well worth the time and aggravation they take up, both educating and challenging each participant to think about important topics in new and exciting ways. To see the other side of an opinion and consider it, if only for a moment. Go back as far as Plato, farther even, and you will find the general conceit is that discussion leads to decision, and so on and so forth.

Egyptian filmmaker Yousry Nasrallah hopes to extend a political discussion to the ends of the earth with his new film Baad el Mawkeaa (After the Battle), and it’s a discussion well worth having. Unfortunately, the story his beloved issues are wrapped in is not quite worth telling.

Revolving around what is now known as the Battle of the Camel, Nasrallah paints a portrait of a fully-realized Egypt, one in which traditional culture and a new, more democratized...

Gil Scott-Heron famously said "The revolution will not be televised," but as the Occupy movement and the events in Syria and Egypt have shown, not only are these actions on TV, they're on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well. Social media and the ever-quickening 24 hours cycle have seen protestors and governments alike shift and adapt strategies, tactics and rhetoric faster than ever before. And it's against this backdrop that director Yousry Nasrallah has delivered "After The Battle," a well-intentioned if clunky and uneven drama set among the boiling tension and emotion of the uprisings in Egypt in 2011.

The film uses "The Battle Of The Camels" to kick off the story. Occuring on February 2, 2011, one week after Egyptians first took to the street, the incident saw pro-Mubarak forces attack protestors in Tahrir square, with reports of camel and horse riders from Nazlet El-Samman being paid to start riots. This is notable because the residents of Nazlet,...

Nasrallah tackles Tahrir Uprising Barely a Year Later, Will Suffer his own Battle Scars

Taking as its topic the Tahrir Square uprising in February 2011, Yousry Nasrallah’s After the Battle is a melodramatic soap opera has McLuhan-esque formal pretensions and leaves viewers more defeated than fired up. Characters weak and empowered alike have argument after argument over seemingly every social issue in Egypt as it relates to the Mubarek regime’s influence, a fundamental flaw in the script that reduces what should be living, breathing humans into non-descript participants in what resembles the world’s most disorganized debate tournament. When someone does engage in an aspect of life that could be considered banal, it’s quickly escalated to an nth degree of tension and screaming, as if Nasrallah were worried his audience was getting bored with it. Just narratively disjointed enough to be certifiably unconventional, there is little to justify...

The director: Yousry Nasrallah (Egyptian, 59 years old)  The talent: I admit defeat. After scouring the internet for details of the cast and crew of this one, all I can tell you is that it stars Nahed El Sebaï (one of the lead actresses from Egyptian feminist drama "678," which netted a number of prizes on the smaller festival circuit last year), Bassem Samra (a longstanding collaborator of the director, acclaimed for his turn in Nasrallah's laurelled 1999 film "El Medina") and Menna Shalabi (whose 12-year filmography contains, I confess, no titles I recognize). I can't even locate a screenplay credit...