Between 2010 and 2014 the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky created the Cabaret Crusades, a trilogy of films in which marionettes act out a history of the Crusades from an Arab perspective. Ten years later Shawky made Drama 1882, referring a fight that broke out between a Maltese man and a local donkey owner in a café in Alexandria. The brawl became a flashpoint for the ‘Urabi revolt against European and Ottoman rule, which the British swiftly crushed before bringing Egypt under their effective control. The film, in which real actors move as uncannily as marionettes, was first shown at the Egyptian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. It now comes to the Grand Palais in Paris, where local audiences will have six weeks to catch a vivid retelling of a period of Egypt’s history in which France was heavily involved (10 June–26 July).
Find out more from the Grand Palais’s website.
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