The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni

The film is a rapturous elegy to a rich and versatile era of film production in Egypt which has lapsed today, through the work of one of its most revered actresses and stars: Soad Hosni, who from the early 1960s into the 1990s, embodied the modern Arab woman in her complexity and paradoxes. Born in Cairo in 1943, Soad Hosni committed suicide in London in 2001. Between the ages of 19 and 49, she appeared in 82 feature films with 37 directors. Pieced exclusively from VHS footage of Egyptian films starring Soad Hosni, the film is constructed as a tragedy in three acts where the actress tells her dreamed life story in the first person. The coarse and scratched visuals are an ode to the VHS tape that revolutionised the wide dissemination of film for home and personal use. Irreverent, playful, marvellous and serious, this spectral biography of the “Cinderella of Arab cinema” underscores the saving grace of fiction. In only seventy minutes, the film proposes a singular and poetic rewriting of a golden period of Egyptian cinema, enacted by an exceptional artist, tragic star, and symbol of modern Arab womanhood.