Last time I wrote about Masjid al-Nour was on July 23, 2011, because a friend named Amr was disappeared that day during a march, demanding an end to military rule and trials and marking the 23rd of July coup-turned-revolution, 59 years later—fortunately, that Amr reappeared a few long hours later and it turned out he was kidnapped by pro-SCAF citizens (we used to call them thugs) who believed he was a Mossad agent on the grounds that he had long hair made into a beautiful braid.

This time I’m writing about the mosque because of another friend named Amr, whose coffin, on the 28th of last month, December, 2025, was carried from the mosque for burial. A few months earlier, I had performed the Islamic funeral prayers (ṣalāt al-janāzah) twice – for two women, an in-law and a relative – but this time I was just listening outside, when the imam opened with this declarative yet strangely moving statement: “We have before us two women and two men.” (“بين أيدينا سيدتان ورجلان.”). Those 4 freshly deceased persons died separately and ended up there together by mere chance of course. One of them, Amr Bayoumi, was the reason why I was there. He died that morning in a nearby hospital after a flu virus complicated his situation as he lay due for open-heart surgery to repair or replace his mitral valve. Although according to his own narrative, his latest – yet unreleased – film was to blame; he said repeatedly this film was going to kill him, and, in a way, it apparently did. But at least he finished it before it finished, or helped finish, him off.

When I was commissioned to write about Amr Bayoumi’s masterwork and interview him 4 years ago, I hadn’t yet realized it was he who directed the made-for-TV movie Al Jisr (The Bridge, 1997) that stood out from the run-of-the-mill state TV productions, and that I really loved at the age of 16—partly because I identified with the adolescent protagonist in this coming-of-age family-friendly drama and wished I had the granddad played by Mahmoud Morsi, anxious to protect, nurture, and get to know his grandchild, in the process introducing him to classical Arabic poetry. (Amr told me last year that the kid who played the teenager’s role died a few years ago, while the girl who played his girlfriend was now a face-veiled middle-aged woman.)

What follows is my attempt to write more or less an obituary, that is, basically a short biography trying to encapsulate who someone was, what their life was, and their significance is, actually about. But first let Amr tell us who he was: the below is to my knowledge the most up-to-date bio he cowrote, authorized and provided his audience with for what was to be, also to my knowledge, the last public screening and discussion of one of his films he was present at (I put the film program together and moderated the Q&A):

عمرو بيومي سينمائي مصري لديه أكثر من 40 عاما من الخبرة في مجالات الإعلام وصنع الأفلام. حصل على بكالوريوس الإخراج السينمائي من المعهد العالي للسينما بالقاهرة في 1985، وبدأ مسيرته المهنية قبل تخرجه كمساعد مخرج في حوالي 10 أفلام روائية طويلة بين عامي 1984 و1988، ثم انتقل إلى المملكة المتحدة فعمل في لندن بين عامي 1988 و1994 كناقد سينمائي في جريدة «العرب»، ومدير العرض والدعاية لشركتي يونايتد سينماز إنترناشونال وكانون سينماز لمتد. منذ عودته إلى مصر، في 1995، أنجز أفلاما روائية ووثائقية، طويلة وقصيرة، تركز على الحياة في مصر منذ زمن طفولته، وتمزج الشخصي بالعام. فمثلا يتناول أحدثها أيام العزل في سنة جائحة 2020، والحياة فيما يعرف بمدن الموتى التي تأثرت بشكل درامي بعد تصوير الفيلم ضمن التغيرات العمرانية الهائلة في قاهرة السنوات الأخيرة. أشهر أفلامه الروائية هو «الجسر» (1997) أما أشهر أفلامه الوثائقية فهو  «رمسيس راح فين؟» (2019)، وقد حصل «الجسر» على الجائزة البرونزية من مهرجان القاهرة السينمائي الدولي للأطفال، وجائزة أفضل إخراج عمل أول من المهرجان القومي للسينما المصرية، وجائزة لجنة التحكيم الخاصة من المركز المصري الكاثوليكي للسينما. أما «رمسيس» فحصل على جائزة أفضل فيلم تسجيلى طويل من المهرجان القومى للسينما لعام ٢٠٢٠، وجائزة أحسن فيلم من جمعية الفيلم للعام نفسه، والجائزة الكبرى لمهرجان الإسماعيلية السينمائي الدولي

Amr Bayoumi is [was?] an Egyptian filmmaker with over 40 years of experience in media and filmmaking. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in film directing from the Higher Institute of Cinema in Cairo in 1985, and began his career, even before graduating, as an assistant director on about 10 feature films between 1984 and 1988. He then relocated to the United Kingdom and worked in London between 1988 and 1994 as a film critic for Al-Arab newspaper, and as the exhibition and publicity manager for United Cinemas International and Cannon Cinemas Ltd. Since returning to Egypt in 1995, he has made feature and short narrative and documentary films, focusing on life in Egypt between the time of his childhood and the present, blending what’s personal and private with what’s shared and experienced collectively and publicly. For example, his latest films deal respectively with the days of home confinement during the pandemic and life in inhabited cemeteries known as “cities of the dead”, which were dramatically affected after the film was shot amid the drastic urban transformations in Cairo in recent years. His most famous narrative film is The Bridge (1997), while his most famous documentary is Where Did Ramses Go? (2019). The Bridge won the Bronze Award at the Cairo International Children’s Film Festival, the Best First Feature Film Award at the National Egyptian Film Festival, and the Special Jury Prize from the Egyptian Catholic Centre for Cinema. Ramses won the Best Feature Documentary Award at the 2020 National Egyptian Film Festival, the Best Film Award from the Egyptian Film Association for the same year, and the Grand Prize at the Ismailia International Film Festival.

Amr was what they call in the English-speaking metropole “late bloomer”, because normally, or naturally to be more aligned with this language, you’re supposed to bloom young and peak some time around so-called middle age. But that has nothing to do with nature. A human life isn’t linear beyond a certain biological trajectory. Things depend heavily on social conditions and personal factors. The global advances in life expectancy notwithstanding (put that in mind when you look with awe at what Alexandre or Napoleon ‘achieved’ in their early 30s), as far as the Global South is concerned (i.e. the former colonies that continue to be not-so-remotely colonized), chances are you’d bloom, if at all, only later in age.

Thus, Amr came to existence as a filmmaker in the world of arthouse cinema only 2 or 3 years shy of turning 60, with Where Did Ramses Go?, in my opinion one of the finest Egyptian documentaries ever made (read my review, linked to above, which was part of a larger text accompanying a film program.) But if you ask me, it was 9 or 14 years before when Amr had made what should have been considered a really important contribution to Egyptian documentary filmmaking: Kalam f’il Jins (Sex Talks) actually made in 2005 but first shown only in 2010 (self-released by Amr without a distributor), is the only successful attempt to date by an Egyptian to make a film about the sex life of contemporary Egyptians; this is the film I’ve shown and discussed with Amr and the audience in 2025 alongside Omar Amiralay’s Love Aborted (aka Sarcophagus of Love, 1984), and it turned out, when I first expressed to Amr my desire to show the two films together, that he actually had once done exactly that.

Cinematically speaking, Amr was first and foremost a chronicler of post-1952 Cairo both in documentary and fiction modes. Besides The Bridge, which Samir Farid rightly considered a visual document of late 1990s Heliopolis, Sex Talks, and Ramses, he made a documentary about an Egyptian communist poet and former political prisoner (Zinelabedine Fouad–part 1; part 2), a feature narrative about provincial young women studying and living in Cairo, Balad el-Banat (Girls’ Country), a hybrid short about staying home during the messy quarantine, and a documentary about life and death in Cairo’s old cemeteries which he originally named Tree of Life but Aljazeera released as Cities of the Dead (not out of respect to Terrence Malick, but out of pragmatism), a title Amr disliked, finding it orientalistic; I guess another reason is that it emphasises death, the exact opposite of what his own title did—but after all, isn’t this just one integral aspect of anything orientalistic?

Obviously, then, Bayoumi’s oeuvre and creative universe are inseparable from Cairo—not unlike Naguib Mahfouz, who also came of age in the neighborhood of Abbasiyya. However – again not unlike Mahfouz who sometimes set his stories outside Cairo – besides filming in Bosnia and Afghanistan for investigations about the wars there, and in Alexandria, where his most recent fictional short, Rajul al-Bahr (The Sea Man), is set, Bayoumi has been working for years on the religious festival (mawlid, birth celebration) of Sufi Sheikh Abul Hassan al-Shazli in Wadi Humaithara. A project in early development was a narrative feature set in Nag Hammadi, based on Mona el-Shimi’s novel, Yūsuf Kamāl fī riwaya ukhrā (Yusuf Kamal: A Story Retold).

His latest, the one that according to him killed him, is a 47-minutes documentary about generations of the Egyptian left, to be posthumously released by Aljazeera with whom he worked extensively for over 20 years. In November, I watched a rough cut of Magnun Omniat (A Wishful Madman, or Mad with Hope) with Amr and friends—which was also an opportunity to discover the extent of one of his strategies as a filmmaker. Just as he filmed the relocation of the Statue of Ramses II in 2006 only to include it in a film 13 years later, he had filmed interviews with the prominent communists Youssef Darwish, Saad Zahran, ‘Atiyya el-Serafy, Ref’at el-Saeed and Salah Isa long ago, around the same time.

His extant, diverse yet dispersed archive now has to be taken care of. I’m aware that many of his recorded interviews and perhaps other footage are proprietary to producers and distributors who may never make them available for public access or use by other filmmakers, artists, writers or researchers. But let’s begin by trying and compiling a definitive, or at least nearly complete, filmography, something I’m not sure Amr did and published somewhere (he was very active on Facebook). Amr was also a prolific photographer. He must have left behind thousands of photos. Not to mention his writings.

A few days after you departed this life, Amr, I wished you a happy new year. Today, one month later, it’s January 28. Happy Antipolice Day, Amr! Rest in peace dear friend, away and free from the bloody bastards.