EL GOUNA: It takes phenomenal guts for a first-time director to tackle a subject such as leprosy, with an actual victim of the disease in the lead role.
A. B. Shawky’s “Yomeddine,” which screened at the El Gouna Film Festival this week, is a touching road-trip drama starring Rady Gamal, a real-life leprosy survivor. The director met Gamal at a leper colony north of Cairo when he made a short documentary, “The Colony,” in 2009. He could not have found a better actor. Gamal is not ashamed of his disease or disability and uses his wrinkled face with marvelous ease to express his joys and pains.
Gamal stars as Beshay and when first we see him, his gnarled hands rummaging through a garbage bin, we are shocked. When his mentally unstable wife Ireny (Shoq Emara) dies, Gamal decides to find his estranged family. He gets into his donkey cart and, along with young friend Obama (Ahmed Abdelhafiz), embarks on the journey of a lifetime. Since ancient times, lepers have been treated as outcasts (as we saw in most brutal form in William Wyler’s 1959 classic “Ben-Hur”), and not much has changed for Beshay in the present day. He is looked down upon and kept at arm’s length by people unduly fearful of contracting the disease. The road from Cairo, where Beshay begins his journey, to Luxor, where the family that abandoned him lives, is filled with adventures, some happy, some not.
Although the movie has several high points, which probably helped it earn its competition slot at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the plot is weak in places, becoming boringly predictable, and some scenes simply seem unnecessary. For instance, was there really a need for flashbacks and dream sequences, which appear to stick out like a sore thumb?
The climax, meanwhile, seems forced as Shawky seems to have taken the easy way out. If the idea was to draw the viewer into an emotional trap, it does not quite work. However, “Yomeddine” does steer clear of becoming a celebration of disfigurement and poverty.
Film review: Fact meets fiction in ambitious drama ‘Yomeddine’
Film review: Fact meets fiction in ambitious drama ‘Yomeddine’
- Yomeddine is a touching road-trip drama
- It steers clear of becoming a celebration of disfigurement and poverty
Sotheby’s to bring coveted Rembrandt lion drawing to Diriyah
DUBAI: Later this month, Sotheby’s will bring to Saudi Arabia what it describes as the most important Rembrandt drawing to appear at auction in 50 years. Estimated at $15–20 million, “Young Lion Resting” comes to market from The Leiden Collection, one of the world’s most important private collections of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art.
The drawing will be on public view at Diriyah’s Bujairi Terrace from Jan. 24 to 25, alongside the full contents of “Origins II” — Sotheby’s forthcoming second auction in Saudi Arabia — ahead of its offering at Sotheby’s New York on Feb. 4, 2026. The entire proceeds from the sale will benefit Panthera, the world’s leading organization dedicated to the conservation of wild cats. The work is being sold by The Leiden Collection in partnership with its co-owner, philanthropist Jon Ayers, the chairman of the board of Panthera.
Established in 2006, Panthera was founded by the late wildlife biologist Dr. Alan Rabinowitz and Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan. The organization is actively engaged in the Middle East, where it is spearheading the reintroduction of the critically endangered Arabian leopard to AlUla, in partnership with the Royal Commission for AlUla.
“Young Lion Resting” is one of only six known Rembrandt drawings of lions and the only example remaining in private hands. Executed when Rembrandt was in his early to mid-thirties, the work captures the animal’s power and restless energy with striking immediacy, suggesting it was drawn from life. Long before Rembrandt sketched a lion in 17th-century Europe, lions roamed northwest Arabia, their presence still echoed in AlUla’s ancient rock carvings and the Lion Tombs of Dadan.
For Dr. Kaplan, the drawing holds personal significance as his first Rembrandt acquisition. From 2017 to 2024, he served as chairman of the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage, of which Saudi Arabia is a founding member.
The Diriyah exhibition will also present, for the first time, the full range of works offered in “Origins II,” a 64-lot sale of modern and contemporary art, culminating in an open-air auction on Jan. 31 at 7.30 pm.
