Nadah El Shazly: Music Performance

Nadah El Shazly is a singer and composer living and working in Cairo. She released her critically acclaimed debut album AHWAR in November 2017 via Nawa Recordings. Two years in the making, Ahwar was composed, written and produced by El Shazly herself in collaboration with Maurice Louca and Sam Shalabi on co-composition and arrangement duties. The album was crafted across two continents, between Canada and Egypt, and features the best of Montreal’s contemporary-classical and improvised music scene. As part of her engagement with SIFF, El Shazly will perform her particular blend of jazz, avant- garde, electro-acoustic and classical Arabic sounds at Komito Beach – a fitting portal into a night featuring the play between myth and reality.

During her visit at SIFF in 2018, Nada El Shazly presented a music performance at Komito Beach, next to a live scoring of the film People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, Weimar Republic, 1930), in collaboration with Mike Cooper.

One of the earliest pieces of film to hybridize fiction with documentary, creating entirely new cinematic forms, People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, Weimar Republic, 1930, DCP, 74 ́) also happened to have been crafted by a litany of directors who went on to have illustrious careers. Siodmak, Ulmer, Billy Wilder, and Fred Zimmerman banded together on this inter-war dream of leisure and light, casting non-professional actors to activate the sensuality and light-heartedness of 1930s Berlin. The careers of these directors took off after they departed Nazi Germany for the promise of Hollywood; the film depicts a rarely-documented version of Deutschland before the deluge.

Carrying on the collaborative spirit of the creation of the film, musicians Mike Cooper and Nadah El Shazly will co-live scored the film, channeling the far-off, peaceful light of the film onto the island.