EGYPTIAN DIRECTOR Youssef Chahine’s 1953 film Struggle in the Valley starts with a scene in which the daughter of a rich landlord, returning to her village after completing her studies in Cairo, stops her car near a sugarcane field on the banks of the river Nile to meet her childhood friend. Played by a young Omar Sharif, the man is attracted to the girl, the daughter of his father’s employer. Part of a tribute to Sharif (who passed away in July this year) at the just concluded 37th Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF), the film evokes memories of the rich-girl-poor-boy dramas of the early days of the neorealism era in Hindi cinema. With the camera lingering in the mammoth indoors of the...
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