In his capacity as a director, the renowned Egyptian actor Noor al Sherif nominated actor Mahmoud Hemeidah to play a starring role in his film Um Ya Massri (get up Egyptian).
The film marks the second direction experience for Sherif after his film al Ashiqan (the two lovers).
Um Ya Massri was written by Abdel Rahman Mohsen who wrote the story of the film Hatem Zahran’s Time, one of the three prominent films in which Sherif starred 15 years ago.
The new film is about a group of Egyptian officers and soldiers who were taken as prisoners of war by the Israeli forces during war. The film is closer to personal memoirs of the writer who suffered bitterly from captivity by the Israeli forces in 1973.
“I will be satisfied with performing a short role in the film so that I will dedicate my full time for direction in view of the sensitive topic of the film. Most of the film’s events will be the responsibility of Hemeidah who provisionally accepted to participate in it,” Sherif told the London-based Arabic daily al Sharq al Awsat.
Initially the Egyptian censors rejected the film’s name Juim which is a Hebrew word meaning non Jewish because the censors did not want a Jewish world to be a title for an Egyptian film -- Albawaba.com
