Hassan El Emam

Hassan El Emam

Technical information

An Egyptian director, born in Mansoura in 1919. He started his career as an assistant director to Youssef Wahbi. He began working in a period when the audience preferred melodrama...Read more and tragic stories, which he excelled in creating. Although his films were popular, the critics were always attacking him. He made his directorial debut with the 1946 movie Angels of Hell. Among his most famous films during that period are The Two Orphans (1948),People Have Wronged Me (1950). In 1962 El Imam moved to a different stage in his career, as he replaced director Salah Abu Seif in directing the movie Between the Two Palaces, based on the novel by Naguib Mahfouz, which marked the beginning of his adapting Naguib Mahfouz's work. He followed it with Midaq Alley (1963),and The Palace of Desire (1966). He was always accused of ruining Mahfouz's novels in his adaptations. In the seventies, El Imam went on to direct a different type of films, mostly musicals, due to the resounding success of his movie Watch Out For Zuzu (1972),which played in theaters for nearly a year. He cowrote the scripts and dialogues for a large number of his films, most of which were taken from French popular novels, although he always mentioned the sources of his films in the credits. El Imam died in Cairo on January 29, 1988, leaving behind a film legacy that exceeded 100 movies.