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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…
