Renowned filmmaker Mohamed Khan has been granted citizenship by Egypt on Wednesday (19 March), said the President's office.
The British national, born to an Egyptian mother and a Pakistani father, has been asking for the Egyptian citizenship for over a decade.
Prior to a 2004 amendment to the nationality law, Egyptian women married to foreigners were not allowed to pass on their citizenship to their children, reported AFP.
Khan has been making a string of movies tackling social issues that have often revolved around female central characters since the 1980s.
In last year's Dubai International Film Festival, Khan's latest film, Factory Girl, won two awards and went on release in Cairo on Wednesday.
The film revolves around a girls named "Hiyam," a young factory worker living in a lower-middle-class neighbourhood of Cairo, who falls in love with her supervisor.
Khan was born in Cairo in 1942 and educated in Britain before beginning his film career in the Egyptian capital in the 1960s as a script writer.
AFP described the 71-year-old as one of Egypt’s most prominent directors, belonging to a generation of neo-realist filmmakers that represented a hallmark in Egyptian cinema.
