Asma El Bakry

As a production manager, El Bakry made about twenty documentaries in Egypt for the BBC. She also made a number of short films and worked on Raymond Depardon's Une Femme en Afrique. She made her first feature as a director in 1991, Beggars and Nobles [fr], which she also co-produced. It could be argued that most of her documentaries reveal deep interest in Egyptian history and a keen desire to shed light on its past civilizations with the ultimate aim of instructing the new generation. In Dahsha, for instance, she traces the history of wooden boats used by the ancient Egyptians until modern times. In El Zaher District (Hay el Daher), she sheds light on the history of that district in Cairo, which was established by the Sultan Zaher Bibars in the thirteenth century.

When she first started in school, she would cast her classmates and play the role of the director herself. During her last year at university, she attended the shooting of the film A House Made of Sand (Bayt min al-rimâl) in 1972. El Bakry was a swimming champion, and she volunteered to do the difficult stunt of pretending to drown in the rough, cold sea in place of Poussi, who was the lead role. She volunteered to help in general, and got so caught up in the making of the film that she became an indispensable hand on location. It was meeting with Abdel Aziz Fahmy, the film's Director of photography, which was to change the course of her life, for he was the one who helped her into the film business by allowing her to work as an assistant in his next film Strangers (Ghorbâ’), directed by Saad Arafa.

Asma El Bakry (28 October 1947 – 5 January 2015) (something written as Asmaa El-Bakri and other variations) was an Egyptian film director, author and illustrator. She was born in Cairo, moving to Alexandria as a young girl with her mother and brother. She attended the renowned French school, Notre Dame de Sion and Lycée, and earned a BA in French literature from the University of Alexandria in 1970.