Tuesday 30/December/2025 – 06:01 PM
Scriptwriter Sayed Fouad, President of the Luxor African Film Festival, announced that the festival, in its fifteenth session, scheduled to be held from March 30 to April 6, 2026, will dedicate it to the soul of the late great director Daoud Abdel Sayed, in appreciation of his overall artistic contributions and his high position in the history of Egyptian and Arab cinema.
Luxor African Film Festival
He explained that the festival administration decided to create a new award bearing the name of the Author’s Cinema Award, given to the film whose author is its director. It is the cinematic formula in which the late director Daoud Abdel Sayed excelled, and through which he presented prominent marks in the history of Egyptian cinema, including the films: The Thief of Joy, Searching for Sayed Marzouk, and Extraordinary Abilities.
For her part, director Azza Al-Husseini, director of the Luxor African Film Festival, stated that the 15th session will witness, in cooperation with the National Film Centre, a project to restore the documentary film The Testament of a Wise Man in Village Affairs and Education, which was produced by the National Film Center in 1976 and is considered Daoud Abdel Sayed’s first film, within the framework of preserving his cinematic heritage and re-presenting it to new generations.
She added that the festival will screen, within the program of this session, a number of films by the late director, including: Kit Kat, Searching for Sayed Marzouk, Land of Fear, and The Thief of Joy, in addition to his documentary film The Will of a Wise Man in Village Affairs and Education.
It is worth noting that the Luxor African Film Festival had honored the late director Daoud Abdel Sayed for all of his works in its first session in 2012, in a special celebration held inside the Luxor Temple, in one of the defining moments in the festival’s history.
The Luxor African Film Festival is headed by the great star Mahmoud Hemida, and its supreme committee is headed by film producer and distributor Gaby Khoury. It is organized by the Young Independent Artists Foundation for Support and Development, which is a non-profit civil organization. The festival is held in partnership with the Egyptian Ministries of Culture, Tourism, Antiquities, Youth, Sports, and Foreign Affairs, in cooperation with Luxor Governorate, and sponsored by the Filmmakers Syndicate.
