Prolific Egyptian director Marwan Hamed shared insights into his career and his box-office hits during a special session with director Yousry Nasrallah (Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story; Brooks, Meadows and Lovely Faces) at the 55th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on Monday evening.
IFFR 2026 features a retrospective celebrating Hamed and works spanning the past two decades, as well as the European premiere of El Sett, his biopic of Egyptian singer and actress Umm Kulthum, starring Mona Zaki (Flight 404) and Mohamed Farag (Voy!Voy!Voy!).
“Hamed has repeatedly set box office records in his home country — most recently with historical epic Kira & El Gin, which became the biggest financial success in Egyptian cinema history at the time of its release, bringing post-pandemic audiences back to theaters in droves,” said IFFR organizers. “From Hamed’s feature debut in 2006 with the screen adaptation of Alaa Al Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building, which sees him directing a screenplay written by his late father Wahid Hamed, he has made blockbuster films which have garnered both significant commercial and artistic recognition.”
So, film fans were listening closely to the director’s insights into crafting story arcs and scenes. One of the more surprising insights involved YouTube and hyenas. Yes, you read that right! But let me explain…
Hamed’s second feature, the 2009 film Ibrahim Labyad, starring Ahmed El Sakka, is about a boy who witnesses the murder of his father at the hands of drug dealers. When he grows up, he decides to seek revenge.
The movie includes a memorable street fight scene. “One thing about that fight is that there’s no intention of killing, so nobody wants to kill anyone,” Hamed explained when asked about it. “It’s to dominate this neighborhood.”
The creative team turned to a video website that was still fairly new back then as it put together key elements of that scene. ‘We started looking, searching on YouTube and trying to find videos” of street fights, the filmmaker recalled. “We found so many videos, and then we kind of edited a lot of that together to create a method for how they would behave, how they would move, and how they would fight.”
People in the background of the scene are “half extras, half real people,” he mentioned. Having them was important to creating movement that contributes to the “intimidating” feel of the scene, the director said. “It’s because of the movement in the background, because of the screaming and because of the shouting and so on. … It’s [about] the attitude, and that gives weight to the scene.”
This is where the animals come in. “Actually, one of the references was Animal Planet,” Hamed shared. “The main reference for that fight was based on how hyenas attack. We used to watch Animal Planet a lot, and how a hyena would attack a lion, for example. It would not attack from one side. They would attack from different sides.”
Hamed was also asked about the kind of characters he likes to focus on in his films, citing an interest in redemption stories. “I’m very attracted to characters that have a big arc and a big transformation,” he told the Rotterdam audience. “I am attracted to characters that make mistakes and … that have a resolution for these mistakes.”
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