Oghneyet-Touha-Al-Hazina / The Sad Song of Touha (2026 restoration Cimathèque – Alternative Film Centre)

Atteyat Al Abnoudy: / أغنية توحة الحزينة / Oghneyet-Touha-Al-Hazina / The Sad Song of Touha (EG 1972).

/ أغنية توحة الحزينة / Oghneyet Touha elhazina / La triste chanson de Touha / La triste chanson du Choucha / Sad Song of Touha.

    EG 1972. D+SC: Atteyat Al Abnoudy / Attiyat Al-Abnudi / Ateyyat El-Abnoudy. DP: Kamal Mahgoup – b&w – 16 mm. S: Magdy Eletriby. ED: Emad Abdelalieem. Negative editor: Mona Elsabban. P manager: Mohamed Elbustany. Locations supervisor: Salah Mehanna. Assistents: Medhat Sadeq, Nabil Ibrahim, Sherif Sabry. Film supervisor: Georges Lampin. Developed & printed: Cinema City Labs, Cairo 1971. This film received Le Prix des critics français du cinéma, Grenoble Film Festival 1973. Subtitles by Anis Ebaid, Cairo. 12 min. Language: Arabic.

    Restored by Cimathèque – Alternative Film Centre, from a 16 mm positive print provided by Eye Filmmuseum.

    DCP with the original English subtitles from the 16 mm print source: Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre.

    E-subtitles in Italian by Chiara Belluzzi.

    Introduced by Tamer El Said (Cimatheque – Alternative Film Center).

    Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna 2026: Cinemalibero.

    Viewed at Cinema Jolly, 21 June 2026.

Tamer El Said (Bologna 2026): "In her graduation project The Sad Song of Touha, Atteyat Al Abnoudy reveals, from the outset, a filmmaker probing the social textures of everyday life, shaping a cinematic language grounded in poetic realism. With a patient and attentive gaze, the film turns to Cairo’s street performers, not as a spectacle but as art workers, whose gestures voices and rhythms emerge from labour and necessity. Moving between performer and audience, it traces encounters unfolding outside institutional frames, where art persists in fragile yet vital forms. Through a delicate interplay of image, sound, music, and poetic narration, the film opens onto an entangled terrain where women’s and children’s labour converge, and performance becomes inseparable from survival. Here, creativity appears as both necessity and burden, shaped by economic precarity, and extends an invitation to look again and reflect on the act of looking itself, and on the unseen structures that shape visibility." Tamer El Said

AA: Atteyat Al Abnoudy's The Sad Song of Touha is a vivid record of performing arts on the street scene of Cairo: musicians, dancers, fire-eaters, acrobats, human towers, dance classes, spectacles, naive do-it-yourself paintings, shadow plays, silhouette theatres, children's fairgrounds. In her coverage, Atteyat Al Abnoudy meets people on the eye level, creating a vision full of life. The art of the observation is exciting, fast edit keeps things on the move. The image has low contrast due to the quality of the 16 mm positive print source.