Hossam Fahmy-Cairo

The third edition of the El Gouna Film Festival, which will take place from 19 to 27 September, is a good news for the Arab world, about the full screening of the first Egyptian animated film called "The Knight and the Princess". For over twenty years.

The film revolves around a true story in the seventh century about an Arab knight called "Mohammed bin al-Qasim," where this knight, at the age of 17 years, left the city of Basra and go on a cruise to fight pirates who steal and capture the innocent, and during this The Jockey falls in love with an Indian girl who later discovers that she is a princess.

The film is from the drawings of the late Egyptian artist Mustafa Hussein, which is a two-dimensional technique, that is, it was all done manually. The scenario and dialogue was done by the Egyptian author Bashir Al-Deek, the man who dreamed of making the first Egyptian motion picture film with the director Mohamed Hassib. Loyal to the dream all these years, he even directed the film himself to save the project after Haseeb's death.

Bashir Al-Deek is an Egyptian author, especially famous in the 1990s, where he presented a large number of new Egyptian realism films, most notably "Al-Harif" with director Mohamed Khan and star Adel Imam, and "Escape" with director Atef El-Tayeb and star Ahmed Zaki.

Back in "The Knight and the Princess," the film will be screened after the end of the festival in a number of cinemas in Egypt and the Arab world, and is expected to begin during the months of October and November.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the film starred in the voice performance of some of the brightest Egyptian stars, led by Mohamed Henedy, who previously participated in the sound performance of many Disney films, most notably his role as "Timon". Donia Samir Ghanem, Majed Al-Kadwani, in addition to the present comedian Saeed Saleh, the voice of the late artist Amina Rizk, and the voice of the great artist "Abdel Rahman Abu Zahra", who also participated in the vocal performance of the Disney film "The Lion King". The film also features a set of songs performed by Medhat Saleh and the meeting with Khamisi.

The film, according to El Gouna Festival director Enchel Tamimi through the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Youm, represents a long-awaited Arab dream since the 1960s, an animated film made entirely of pure Arab hands.