Between 1959 and 1964, hundreds of Egyptian communists spent half a decade in prison without meaningful trial. They were subjected to brutal torture that eased only after several detainees were martyred, most notably Shuhdi Atiya, and after an intervention by Yugoslav president Josip Tito. They were eventually released on the eve of the inauguration of the Aswan High Dam and Khrushchev’s historic visit to Egypt. 

Out of those horrific prisons emerged an astonishingly diverse body of intellectual and artistic work, one that marked a decisive turning point in the lives of those who produced it. Some entered prison as little more than party members or political cadres, leaving it as writers and artists.¹ Yet while the imprint of this experience—and that of Egyptian communists more broadly—is unmistakable in literature, theatre, music, and the visual arts, its relationship to cinema has received remarkably little attention, its enigmas still awaiting sustained investigation. 

One of the many reasons to pursue this inquiry lies in the complex relationship that rapidly developed between the July ‘52 regime and the film industry, dictated by both economic and ideological imperatives.² Another reason is cinema’s unparalleled popular reach. Alongside the popular song, the feature film remains, to this day, one of the principal subjects of state attention, from censorship bodies to other mechanisms of control. 

It was in the Wahat prison camp that one of those communists, Mohamed Khalil Qasim, produced an extraordinary achievement—not only for us, his fellow Nubians, but for Egyptian literature as a whole: Al-Shamandoura (The Buoy, 1968). Yet within Nubian collective memory, his political affiliation has been all but eclipsed by his racial and ethnic identity. This has been true ever since 1969, when Nubians gathered around their radios to listen, together, to the radio series adaptation of the novel. It was broadcast under the same title the year after the author’s death, following the decline of his health during his years in prison. 

With its now-iconic Nubian theme song of the same name, the radio drama became a symbolic, if tokenistic, gesture for Nubians. It offered a state-sponsored national narrative that folded them into the fabric of the nation, implicitly honoring their greatest sacrifice—the loss of their ancestral homeland to the High Dam. For Qasim’s comrades, themselves only recently released from prison, the series may have also carried a note of reconciliation and belated recognition, even though it never named the author’s other identity, the one he acquired by conviction rather than by birth. What Nubians and other Egyptian listeners heard, though, was a version adapted to suit the sensibility of Sawt Al-‘Arab (Voice of the Arabs) radio of a sprawling novel written in the literary model that held sway among the communist critics surrounding Qasim in the mid-1950s—socialist realism. 

This model was canonized in the influential Fī al-Thaqāfa al-Miṣriyya (On Egyptian Culture, 1955) by Marxist critics Abdel-Azim Anis and Mahmoud Amin Al-Alim. There, they held up Abdul Rahman Al-Sharqawi’s Al-Ard (The Land, 1954)³ as the exemplary revolutionary novel and its author as the model of the progressive novelist.⁴ The book ignited a major intellectual and literary debate, one that went unchallenged from within Marxist circles until a few years later, when both authors were detained in the Wahat camp.⁵ The parallels between Al-Sharqawi’s novel and Qasim’s are striking: both are set in the early 1930s and revolve around a pivotal moment in the state’s irrigation overhaul plans. Yet what compelled Qasim to write Al-Shamandoura in prison, only a few years after the publication of Al-Ard, was a far more particular and time-sensitive urgency. Alongside the efforts underway to salvage Nubia’s monuments and its tangible and intangible heritage, Qasim sought, from his cell, to save Nubia—then on the verge of submersion for the sake of a major development project whose underlying aims he supported in principle—by fictionalizing an earlier, partial displacement. 

On the pages of Al-Shamandoura, the Nubian reader is jolted by a sudden reversal: These are not the Nubian domestic servants who recur, almost mute, on the Egyptian screen—dressed in domestic or hotel livery, or in a galabiyya never changed since arriving in Cairo, announcing a guest or a phone call for Sidi or Sitti, driving their employers, carrying a telephone or a suitcase, hurrying between kitchen and dining room, opening a door, and so on. In Al-Shamandoura, we see Nubia itself, the very place that flung those servants to the capital, now on the verge of sending a new generation of Nubians into an uncertain fate—one that will also mean displacement to the big city. The capital’s domestic servants, meanwhile, appear in an altogether different social and political role, in the households of another class of master we have not yet seen on screen: “the English and Egyptian irrigation personnel, … the pachas and rulers, and… [men of] the royal palaces.” On these masters, those good-natured, naive, obedient, funny servants—as stereotyped—spied, and passed on to other Nubians, never once shown on screen, what they had learned of the planned project, so that these others could act, from their own positions, on behalf of the Nubian community: as petition writers and journalists who worked for the capital’s magazines and newspapers, able to put the case before public opinion and appeal to decision-makers, secretly and openly.⁶ 

Egyptian communist history holds yet another related surprise. Just as those domestic servants served as conduits between their masters and Nubian intellectuals, they also moved between those same masters and the communist organizations—organizations that brought together the servants, intellectuals, and fellow Egyptians and Egyptianized foreigners of various classes and backgrounds, some of whom were themselves the children of the masters. Are we not entitled, then, to imagine a Nubian servant who, in the parallel life he led within the movement, becomes his master’s comrade—or even his superior?⁷

Egyptian cinema unjustly obscures this story, and many others like it—or erases them outright. Even when rich material is available on the conflicts, contradictions, and transformations of Egyptian society—material found in literary originals, true stories, or historical sources—those in charge of the film adaptations, for example, see to it that this compelling material is ignored, or stripped of its complexity and reduced to an impoverished simplicity. This flattening, disguised as innocent professionalism, is a convention of screenwriting known as “dumbing down,” established under Hollywood’s studio system to address an imagined, average viewer-consumer. But to examine the Egyptian case on its own terms is to uncover processes far less innocent, ones bound up with how the country’s thorniest social questions have been addressed during and after direct colonialism and the monarchy. 

Because the specter of communism was already hovering over Egypt before communism itself had appeared there—the urban and rural crowds of the 1919 revolution, coming less than two years after the Russian October Revolution,⁸ had already stoked the fears of colonial powers, the elites, and the religious establishment—this specter went on to cast its shadow, nearly to the end of the century, over Egyptian cultural production. And despite this long, violent history of anti-communist repression, moral panic, and red-baiting in Egypt—or indeed because of it—glimpses of what, and who, was suppressed flicker briefly on the screen, or lurk in cinematic space. Many Egyptian feature films—many moments along their timelines, many points of convergence and intersection in the processes of their production, reception, and reproduction—are sites haunted by what I call “the specters of communism.” This owes something, at times, to the forms of hybridity, ambiguity, entanglement, and mutual contamination produced by negotiation and concession, or by smuggling; to further complications in which the conscious is bound up with the unconscious; to contradictions specific to the moments of a film’s production and release; and to intersecting wills that begin before the filmmaker’s and do not end with the critic’s engagement. 

What do we need, then, to detect these sites, to conjure these specters, to trace the mark left by communism and communists, remaining equally attentive to their presence and their concealment, and thus able to shed light on what has been erased, obscured, disguised, and distorted of their history and their voice, in these films and behind and around them—in other words, to divulge the displacements of a political taboo? Alongside a range of direct and indirect approaches, this long history of severe repression seems to demand that we follow Egyptian McCarthyism's own gaze: to see, through its eyes, what and whom it identifies as communist, but in a spirit opposed to its practices of surveillance and politics of foreclosure.

Where, then, are those specters in a film that predates 1967, such as Khalil Shawqi’s Al-Gabal (The Mountain, 1965)? The film restages a confrontation between center and periphery, Cairo and Upper Egypt, in the final years of the ancien régime, revisiting the familiar tropes of modernization, enlightenment, and nationalist efforts pitted against the local obstacles embodied by an old, traditional society resisting the modern state and its new ways. The plot reimagines the real-life project of architect Hassan Fathy, whom the government, under royal patronage, commissioned to relocate the residents of an archaeological site in Luxor. In the film, they are to be moved, literally, out of “caves” into modern “buildings” inspired by “local” heritage. The stated purpose is to reorganize the Egyptian village into something cleaner, more orderly, and more modern; the more immediate one, however, was to clear the mountain of its residents, who survived by looting antiquities—or, more precisely, by staking their livelihoods on the promise of discovering buried pharaonic treasures. But royal corruption, tangled up with American-style decadence, comes between the engineer and the villagers, who only discover the futility of their effort and the need for change, after the engineer, their intermediary, is killed. 

The film was produced in the early years of the public-sector’s involvement in Egyptian cinema, where a strong literary source and an established novelist counted as markers of quality. That source, in this case Fathy Ghanem’s 1958 novel of the same title, is precisely what gets butchered here—with Ghanem’s own participation—in the making of a screen narrative that serves a regime which had inherited the ongoing burden of “modernizing” Egyptian society after getting the royal-colonial obstacle out of its way. 

The novel offers an extremely detailed, rich dissection which is deliberately lost in the screenplay and the dialogue, starting from the narrator and protagonist: Fathy Ghanem himself, in his capacity as an investigator from the Ministry of Education who has arrived in the village from Cairo to look into a complaint made by the villagers. Rather than settling for routine procedures, he pushes his investigation somewhere more complex, arriving eventually at a critique of the resettlement project itself, which never accounted for the socio-economic conditions of the residents of the mountain once they’d been moved to the model village. He balks in panic at the prospect of such a report: He imagines a scene in which his boss threatens to have him branded a communist. (This is the kind of form in which communism will “appear” in Egyptian film—through denial of the charge on one hand, and security-state, bureaucratic, and public panic on the other—more forcefully in the second half of the 1980s.) Instead of a complicated story about colonialism, class struggle, state centralization of power, and the contradictions of a changing agrarian society, the film settles for a nationalist allegory, ending—as such narratives do—on a note of revolution to come, a thinly veiled savior. This is the specter of the original novel, haunting a mutilated adaptation that ends up uncannily resembling the very bureaucratic report the book spends every page attacking and condemning. 

And where are these specters in a film made in the wake of defeat, namely Youssef Chahine’s Al-Ard (The Land, 1969)? Everywhere: in the novel behind it, already dense with communist shadows around both story and author, and in the cast and crew, several of whom (such as Abdel-Rahman Al-Khamissi and Hassan Fouad) had themselves been imprisoned by the regime. But the specter that really haunts the film moves through the background of two sequences. In the first, Diab (Ali El-Sherif, in his debut role—his first “audition” having been in prison) pulls off his own shoes to run barefoot across the scorched ground, keeping pace with his educated, donkey-mounted brother, on their way to the train station. In the second, Diab is bound and chained with a group of rebel peasants and marched to the police station, where we watch him tortured along with the others, his head held under filthy water. In both scenes, if you know his not-too-distant history, it hits you all at once: Ali El-Sherif is playing himself. It is hard to imagine he was not drawing on his own experience in prison, as told in numerous eyewitness accounts. A peasant struggle in the 1930s becomes the outlet for a communist’s pain in Nasser’s detention camps on the eve of a national defeat.

These are the specters of untold biographies, of footnotes that go missing. Whereas Chahine’s earlier Al-Nasser Salahuddin (Saladin the Victorious, 1963) offered a straightforwardly heroic, pan-Arabist reading of history, this film resists easy interpretation. On its surface, it obliquely projects an old struggle over land and water onto the present battle to reclaim occupied Egyptian and Arab territory after the defeat, with the High Dam implied as the pinnacle of progress in a long history of irrigation reform in Egypt. But underneath that reading lies a veiled critique of the present regime and society, one that won’t look away from class struggle and the question of democracy, and refuses to settle for a story of national struggle wrapped in false unity. 

Between The Mountain and The Land came Henry Barakat’s Al-Haram (The Sin, 1965), another feat of Egyptian public-sector cinema in the times leading up to the 1967 defeat, adapted from the eponymous novel by Yusuf Idris (1959).⁹ Also a former communist prisoner, Idris would, until his fall-out with Sadat, be a favorite of Egyptian cinema. The novel appeared in 1959, just as Al-Alim and Anis were joining their comrades in prison, and it immediately stood out as a serious new attempt to depict the grievances of rural Egypt ahead of July 1952. The novel and the film alike would go on to become Egyptian landmarks of their respective forms.

But the film is keen on a certain tautology by way of a disclaimer, at both its opening and its ending, that all its events belong to a bygone era that the revolution has already consigned to history—never mind the fact that the villages where it was shot were real villages, its farmers’ misery ongoing. Once again, a class-struggle drama—playing out mainly between landless farmers and smallholders, built around the dual, gendered struggle of Aziza, a woman peasant—gets reworked into a nationalist one: a story set in the time before monarchy and colonial rule were thwarted, before “the whip was lifted off the peasant’s back.” What survives the novel-to-film conversion is the material, almost utopian solidarity that forms around Aziza. Her tragedy dissolves the isolation and alienation keeping the two rural communities apart; they recognize themselves once again as a class, capable of alliance beyond the war of poor against poor, and oppressed against oppressed. 

In fact, you can go all the way back to the very first Egyptian narrative film, Mohamed Bayoumi’s short Barsoum Yabhath ‘an Wazifa (Barsoum Looking for a Job, 1923) and find the first appearance of the specter. In this astounding, inaugural motion picture, two Egyptians—a Copt and a Muslim—go hungry in Alexandria, worn down by unemployment and police harassment, exposing the enormous gap left behind by the now-empty slogans of the 1919 revolution, whose leaders Bayoumi himself had filmed at the time. From the moment of inception of Egyptian narrative cinema, Bayoumi’s film challenges, with real nerve and deep humor, the flimsiness of the nationalist narrative, foregrounding social issues through what should be called, without hesitation, a communist narrative. It does not shy away from blending slapstick comedy with gritty images of poverty, decay, and filth in the cosmopolitan city,¹⁰ two and a half decades before the 1947 censorship code would explicitly ban filmmakers from featuring communist-adjacent topics or portraying poverty in alleyways and villages. The film was lost for decades, and was only recovered thanks to the considerable archival efforts by filmmaker Mohamed Kamel El-Kaliouby¹¹ between 1978 until his death in 2017—conjuring the specter in its first appearance back into its rightful place in the history of Egyptian cinema.¹² 

What if Barsoum, and that specter, had never disappeared? We might not have needed Kamal Selim’s Al-’Azeema (Determination, 1939), a decade and a half later, to let the genie of realism out of its bottle. That film, in turn, cleared a path for Kamel El-Telmissany to leave the trenches of Trotskyist surrealism for cinema’s mass audience: By the end of WWII, he had made a far more political social-realist film, and a sharper break with the mainstream, in Al-Souq Al-Sawda’ (The Black Market, 1945). It also cleared the path for realist filmmakers with communist histories of their own—amongst them Salah Abu Seif and Ahmed Kamel Morsi, whose Al-’Amel (The Worker, 1943) was outright banned, then lost.¹³

Those same wretched streets of Alexandria that Barsoum takes us through, as if touring a crime scene, had been the site of a series of aggravated kidnappings a few years earlier. Those streets witnessed, over the course of WWI, during the 1919 revolution, and well into the following year, the murder of the women for which Rayya, Sekina, and four men were eventually executed. When the crimes came to light in the aftermath of the revolution, they became Egypt’s first major court-of-public-opinion case, and quickly snowballed to become a source of national shame to be hastily buried and moved past, lest colonial authorities exploit it to discredit national independence aspirations. The widely popular feature film about the sister-duo serial killers did not appear until after another “revolution” had happened, in 1953; it was made by the man later labeled the “father of realism” in Egyptian cinema, Salah Abu Seif himself. Then it took another half a century for the Marxist historian Salah Eissa to give the story itself its due—starting with the titular statement, Rijal Rayya wa-Sekina (The Men of Rayya and Sekina, 2002). He had stumbled upon the case’s archive by accident while searching for the file on the trial of the first Egyptian Communist Party, only to discover along the way that the lawyer who happened to defend the sisters and their men had also been a labor lawyer with a leading position within the Party. From there, he moved through the press coverage, the show trial, and finally the film and stage treatments of the story—including Salah Abu Seif’s role as a partner-in-crime: the crime of turning social, economic, and political evil into an entertaining moral fable about evil incarnate. It is the specter of an ‘original crime’ Eissa had already been chasing in an earlier investigation, Afyun wa-Banadiq (Opium and Rifles, 1979),¹⁴ about another outlaw, Khott Al-Sa’id , the notorious gang leader of Upper Egypt—later the subject of Abu Seif’s following film, Al-Wahsh (The Beast, 1954). 

The original crime, in other words, is a political one: colonialism colluding with local elites, the state, and the royal palace—first, to manufacture the criminals, then to shrink the crime down to a sensational headline, an opportunity to announce state-building through the police, all the while as nation-building proceeds through the press and the screen, big and small. But Salah Eissa’s own conjuring of these specters in Rijal Rayya wa-Sekina, with its broad investigation into the brutality of poverty and modern war turns, in the televised adaptation of his book (directed by Gamal Abdel Hamid, 2005), into yet another round of dumbing down, moralizing it for the sake of entertainment, and diabolizing the two women—despite the thirty-five episodes’ worth of screen time available to do otherwise.¹⁵ And in a final, twisted revival of national denialism, this time in the form of historical negationism, a new film was announced on the hundredth anniversary of the revolution and the trial, allegedly based upon newly discovered documents that prove the sisters had been part of the armed resistance against the British.¹⁶ While sainthood and demonization are two sides of the same coin, the specter of social reality lurks behind, warded off.

The specters of communism populate many corners of Egyptian cinema. They show up in ensemble casting, before this became just another selling point for mass marketing. They are in every frame where the nineteenth century lingers alongside the twentieth, and later the twenty-first, as they unfold true to Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development.

The cinematic communist specters guide Arwa Saleh’s own job hunt fantasies, not unlike Barsoum’s: “If I have to ‘do’ something it has to be dynamic, pulsing with the life of the collective. That’s why the idea of working in film crossed my mind—but I have so little technical knowledge.”¹⁷

The specters reappear thanks to the anti-communist tactics deployed by the villains of Salah Abu Seif’s Al-Bidayah (The Beginning, 1986), Mohamed Radi’s Al-Huroub min Al-Khanka (Escape from the Asylum, 1987),¹⁸ Abdellatif Zaki’s Siraa’ Al-Ahfad (The Grandchildren’s Conflict, 1989), and Ali Abdel-Khalek’s Al-Baida wal-Hagar (The Egg and the Stone, 1990). 

The specters abound in Chahine’s oeuvre. Take for another instance his autobiographical Iskindiriyah Leih? (Alexandria…Why?, 1979). Not only does it feature a communist character as one tile in the mosaic of national struggle and social conflict in the 1940s, but also weaves into the narrative an unbelievably subversive subplot, where an Australian soldier, who could have walked out of a Brecht poem, and a nationalist Egyptian aristocrat caught up in the armed struggle, strike up an intimate friendship (also as pen pals) that can be easily read as a queer relationship. These scenes take the nationalist narrative entirely apart, reaching for something closer to internationalism: Suddenly, a monster looms larger than fascism or colonialism—the monster of patriarchy, capitalism, and militarism—and the film’s final stretch carries us, along with the young man Yehia, into the new, American chapter of the capitalist dream/illusion. 

In their afterlives, Chahine’s films come with their own communist specters. In the last installment of Namir Abdel Messeeh’s documentary trilogy (partly about communists and partly about Copts), Al-Hayah Ba’d Siham (Life After Siham, 2025),¹⁹ which collages two Chahine films—Fajr Yawm Jadid (Dawn of a New Day, 1965), the crown jewel of Nasserist socialist realism, and ‘Awdat Al-Ibn Al-Dal (The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1976)—Abdel Messeeh reimagines his mother’s story, waiting as she once was for a suitor from those released from communists’ imprisonment. Another recent documentary, Bassam Mortada’s Abo Zaabal 89, uses footage from The Return of the Prodigal Son alongside other features, to tell another story about a communist father’s imprisonment—this time in the Mubarak era. 

More afterlives, more reappearances: In the last documentary Amr Bayoumi finished before he died, Majnoun Umniyat: Wujuh min Al-Yassar Al-Misri (Mad with Hope: Faces from the Egyptian Left, 2025), Ali Badrakhan’s Al-Karnak (1975) sheds its bad reputation—as the movie that gave name to the exploitation film wave turning against Nasser’s legacy in favor of Sadat (“karnaka”)—when the filmmaker-narrator dwells on the moment he first watched Al-Karnak, at the age of thirteen, as the first seed of a question that has only grown in urgency since: Who were these young people, so preoccupied by Egypt, yet tortured and violated between the prison cells and interrogation rooms of the Egyptian state? An answer is picked up on when one character in the film points two university colleagues, and, by extension, the teenager-viewer, towards a book: Tatawwur Al-Haraka Al-Wataniyya Al-Misriya (The Development of the Egyptian National Movement, 1957) by Shuhdi Atiya, the communist martyr. 

From the first feature film to the most recent documentary, a specter has been haunting Egyptian cinema. It is the specter of communism.