admin Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez, Asmahan, and Mohamed Abdel Wahab were not simply singers who appeared in films. They were, at the time, the cinema. Their voices carried the emotional weight of entire films, such as Gana El Hawa (Love is in His Way to Us) in Abi Foq Al-Shagara (My Father On Top of a Tree, 1969). A single song could stretch for forty minutes, while the camera lingered on the expression of faces that seemed to renew with every modulation of the melody. Yet that marriage between film and music has never really ended. It has only changed with time, and today, a new generation is rewriting Egyptian cinema through music. At Petit Bain in Paris on Friday, 10 April, the Arab cultural platform Kalam Aflam presented Maqam, a curated program of ten short films that opens the Paris stop of Ziad Zaza and Lege-Cy’s World Tour. The event is a living manifesto on how young Arab filmmakers are reclaiming music as an essential storytelling device, pushing it beyond performance or playlist fodder into a narrative that carries the emotion of an entire film. The title itself…
