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How did cinema shape the way people navigated—and imagined—the city of Cairo? How did urban space, colonial modernity, and mass media come together to produce new ways of seeing, working, and dreaming in the Egyptian capital?

Walking in Cinematic Cairo is a three-part event series that explores the entangled histories of cinema, urban infrastructure, and everyday life in Egypt’s capital in the early 20th century. Through film, archival material, and critical discussion, we trace how cinema functioned not only as entertainment but also as a mirror of urban life, a site of political struggle, and a tool of cultural transformation.

• Film Discussion: Cairo Station by Youssef Chahine (July 5)Dive into Chahine’s 1958 masterpiece, Cairo Station, a film that transforms the city’s central train terminal into a cinematic microcosm of post-revolutionary Egypt. Together, we’ll unpack how class, gender, labor, and mobility intersect in this iconic film and urban site. Participants are encouraged to view the film beforehand.
• Talk: When Old Cinema Was New: Media and Leisure in Colonial Egypt (July 12)Karim Elhaies takes us back to the early decades of cinema in Egypt to examine how cinema was entangled with the rise of modern infrastructure and political imagination. From electrical grids to urban planning, cinema’s arrival marked a profound transformation in how Egyptians experienced leisure, modernity, and the colonial city.
• Workshop: Walking through Cairo’s Early Cinematic Archive (July 19) This hands-on workshop offers a close reading of Cairo’s early 20th-century entertainment landscape through maps, ads, newspapers, and cinema ephemera. We’ll explore how film emerged alongside theaters, cabarets, and tramlines, reshaping public life and urban pleasures in a rapidly changing city.

Join us as we walk through Cairo’s cinematic past—one frame, fragment, and footprint at a time.

The series is convened by Karim el-Haies.

Karim Elhaies is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University and co-founder of IDCtheory and Algarabia Language Coop. He holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University. His dissertation studies the history, politics, and aesthetics of Egyptian Cinema with a special focus on the relationship between old and new genres and waves of filmmaking.

This three-day workshop explores martyrdom as subjectivity: a lived, shared, and generative force in the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Our papers derive from the history and intellectual production of various resistance movements in Palestine and Lebanon. Through this insurgent intellectual history we locate the place of martyrdom and sacrifice in the life of the Resistance. From this standpoint, we interrogate, challenge, and re-write extant theory discussing ‘the power over life and death’.

Through four grounded, insurgent research projects, we explore how martyrdom creates biographies beyond the self, how dismemberment becomes a symbol of resilience, how legacy animates resistance, and how traditions breathe new life into partisan struggle.

Together, we ask: What remains after death? What forms of life emerge from sacrifice? And how does martyrdom trouble the sovereign power to define life and death?

Over three days, Ameed Faleh, Ahmed Dardir, Majd Darwish, and Bashar al-Lakis will share their research on martyrdom and/as subjectivity, which will be part of our panel at the forthcoming BRISMES annual meeting.

On the 1st session (Sunday 22 June) the presenters will provide a brief overview of their research, followed by an extensive Q&A session.

On the 2nd session (Monday 23 June) we will discuss some of the material we are using in our research, including primary documents. The documents will be provided beforehand, in case some of the participants would like to go through them in preparation for the discussion.

The 3rd session (Tuesday 24 June) is for the final discussions and concluding remarks. Participants are encouraged to reflect on the relevance of our research for real life struggles—and challenge us if they want.

This is a rehearsal for our forthcoming panel at BRISMES. Part of the revenues will be used to cover our conference expenses.

This is a pay what you may event; participants are welcome to contribute as much (or as little) as they can.

Want to flex your power-knowledge? Show off your discourse? Ask questions about the (very understandable and relatable) theories of Michel Foucault?

Come to our coffee hours and join the discussion.