O Cinema, My Passion

About this book

Between the darkness of screening halls and the glitter of the clapperboard, and between courtroom corridors and the hashish dens of Imbaba, the tales of this book revolve like an old film reel restored to quench the thirst of seekers of "the age of beautiful art." This is no mere autobiography, but honest confessions of a creator who hid behind the camera for forty years, a director of photography and producer who decided one day to chase a costly passion named "cinema." Mohamed Youssef slips into the depths of the human psyche in his short-story collection "O Cinema, My Passion," drawing with his words frames no less precise than his lenses. He takes us on a journey starting from a childhood mortgaged to "three piasters" at a barber's, through a boisterous life as a drummer in the sixties, to the adventures of film production that landed him behind cage bars "for the first time in his life" for the love of art. Between the book's folds, you will find a philosophy of "solitude" the author sees as a luxury only the strong can afford, and harsh lessons about.