Rawya

Ateyyat El Abnoudy

Ateyyat El Abnoudy is an Egyptian documentary filmmaker who started making films as a student in the early 1970s and has had a prolific career in the Arab world. Her films have been exhibited at festivals worldwide, on television in Europe and the Arab world, and at special screenings of retrospectives of her work. She continued making films until 2006, when she became ill. Many of her films were censored from large-scale screenings in cinemas and television. Her first three short documentaries have garnered widespread attention: Horse of Mud (1971), Sad Song of Touha (1972), and The Sandwich (1975). Atteyat was born in 1939 and grew up in rural El Simbelaween, Daqahlia Governorate, north of the Nile Delta1. She grew up in a working-class society and grabbed the Nasserist opportunity to study law at the University of Cairo. In Cairo, she moved into artistic and journalistic circles, mainly because of her relationship with her husband at that time, the poet Abdel-Rahman El Abnoudy (who died in 2015). During her studies, she supported herself financially by working in a theater and as an actress. This interest in law, political journalism, and art, combined with her involvement in acting, awakened a social awareness of class and wealth, an interest in socialism and Marxism, and a curiosity about theater and film. She wrote three books, completed nearly 25 films, and died on October 5, 2018.