People
Mohammad Shawky Hassan
UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow 2012
Mohammad Shawky Hassan is an Egyptian filmmaker currently living in New York City. He holds a B.A. from the American University in Cairo (2004), and a graduate diploma in film directing from the Academy of Cinematic Arts in Cairo (2009). He directed and produced two shorts: “VIP” (2007) and “Alter World/Donya Tanya” (2008), and was the First Assistant Director of the feature-length film “In the Last Days of the City”.
His most recent short film project “it was related to me/ Balaghany Ayyoha Al Malek al Sa’eed” (2011) is a meditation on the complex relationship of two brothers, exploring the interplay of the notions of brotherhood, mentorship,masculinity and sexuality. He recently received a number of writing and production grants for his upcoming feature-length film project “Compos Mentis”, a film essay that reflects on the concepts of sanity and madness, including the Fonds Sud Cinema Writing Grant (2010), the Mawred Production Grant (2011) and the Young Arab Theater Fund Production Grant (2011). He is an alumnus of the Berlinale Talent Campus (2009) and a recipient of the Fulbright Grant for Fine & Applied Arts (2010). Between September 2010 and June 2011, he was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University School of the Arts, where he focused on the study of alternative aesthetics. He is currently a film programmer at ArteEast.
Through his films, he explores issues pertinent to childhood, sexuality, religious and nationalist speech, and personal and collective memory, by constructing stories using a broad range of images (photographs, videos, film), sounds and
text, whether original, found or recreated. His search for cinematic qualities in images typically categorized as “mundane” lies within his broader interest in the production, consumption and recreation of images in daily life.
