Youssef Chahine

In the sprawling, semi-autobiographical film Alexandria ... Why?, someone says of the young hero, a would-be filmmaker, "The boy knows exactly what he wants. He'll make it." Youssef Chahine did make it--a busy, exemplary career that spanned nearly six decades of making movies, myths and trouble and ended when he died July 27, at 82, six weeks after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.

Few of his 40-plus features achieved any kind of release in the U.S., and his only impact on Hollywood movies was that he made a star of a young Egyptian named Omar Sharif. But at film festivals, Chahine was for decades the prime, often the only, representative of an entire continent, Africa, and a world religion, Islam--though his family was Christian and his heritage Lebanese and Greek. He was both a nationalist and an internationalist, both an art-house auteur and a director of movies that were popular from Morocco to Indonesia.

He made political points--sometimes anti-U.S., often against the Egyptian hierarchy--but his didacticism was typically overwhelmed by his irrepressible urge to entertain, whether with the underclass tragedy Cairo Station (1958) or with a delirious love story like The Other (1999). Influenced by Hollywood comedy, Italian neorealism and Indian musical melodramas, he tossed everything--ideas, people, whole nations and regions--up in the air for the intoxicated viewer to try to catch.

Adventurous American movie lovers should try tracking down these visions of a cosmopolitan filmmaker from the Arab world. Especially one reflecting the dreams and fears of a people whose popular culture is nearly unknown in the U.S.