Sleepless

Nadia, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy family, is seized by jealousy when she learns her father means to marry again. She works to break the two apart, spreads lies about the woman who is to become her stepmother, and takes up with a man twice her age. Every step she takes harms others and herself alike; the film tells this not in a tone of instruction but by showing the consequences. The account works with the moulds of Egyptian melodrama of the fifties and was adapted from a book. What lies beneath the girl’s anger is allowed to be felt: the fear of losing her father. Faten Hamama and Omar Sharif appear in Salah Abu Seif’s hundred and twenty five minute Egyptian film, completed in 1957.