Making Film in Egypt

Chihab El Khachab is a Junior Research Fellow in Anthropology in Christ Church, University of Oxford.

"[A] detailed and unique contribution to the field of Egyptian cinema studies."—Samirah Alkassim, Review of Middle East Studies"Scholarly, lucid, informative, and well written. . . Recommended."—CHOICE"Making Film in Egypt is an incredible tool in the way that El Khachab conceives of the relationship between human and nonhuman actors as they mediate the imponderable, socio-technical process of making a film."—Media Industries Journal“New and exciting. . . an important contribution to Middle East film and media studies and media anthropology.”—BORDERLINES"The central puzzle animating Chihab El Khachab's detailed ethnographic description of filmmaking in Cairo is how complex production processes made up of thousands of small decisions and acts, all with good odds of failure and infelicity, come to fruition with some regularity in the Egyptian film industry."—Lotte Hoek, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies"[A] vividly textured study . . . . Khachab's research is an exercise in retracing the concrete labor that production teams work so hard to keep hidden."—Mada Masr"A production-side ethnography is a sort of Holy Grail for media studies scholars working in Egypt and the region. A few scholars have done it to a degree, but Making Film in Egypt is in a different class. El Khachab’s work will revolutionize how we think of Arab media production."—Walter Armbrust, University of Oxford"El Khachab has given us a highly original analysis of the deep connections among labor, technological devices, and temporality in the famed Egyptian film industry. With exciting interdisciplinary insights and rich ethnography, Making Film in Egypt brilliantly reveals hidden yet critical aspects of the creative process."—Jessica R Winegar, Northwestern University"Making Film in Egypt takes us beyond the glitz and glam of the Arab world’s most influential film industry to examine what everyday practices of production reveal about the intersections of technology, labor, and human inventiveness. Chihab El Khachab reconceives cinema’s enchanting mediation through the mundane and routine anticipations of its creators and their technological devices. From script to screening, he urges us to reconsider filmmaking as the crafting of unpredictable yet inevitable futures."—Yasmin Moll, University of Michigan