CAIRO, July 27: The grand master of Arab cinema, Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine, died at the age of 82 in Cairo on Sunday after an often controversial career which spanned half a century.

For a man already in his 80s and who was credited with introducing art-house movies to the Arab world, his last work “Chaos” (released last year with the Arabic title of Heya Fawda) pulled no punches. “He skewers political parties and Islamists,” was the verdict of the film industry’s Variety magazine.

“He levels devastating charges against the past half-century of autocratic rule, whose regimes have destroyed civil society and made the average citizen either apathetic or afraid to protest.”

Chahine was airlifted to hospital in Paris after suffering a brain haemorrhage and falling into a coma on June 14, with the Egyptian state footing the bill. He was returned to Egypt still comatose on July 16.

“I am young. I am only 81 years old,” Chahine told a press conference at the Venice Film Festival last September. “I hope I can keep working for another 10 years. Old age is to let oneself become old.” Chahine won official plaudits for his pioneering role in Egypt’s film industry and was awarded the Cannes festival’s 50th anniversary lifetime achievement award in 1997.

But he has never shied away from controversy, criticising US foreign policy as well as Egypt and the Arab world.

Chahine made his first of 44 movies in 1950 and it was he who discovered and launched the career of fellow Egyptian Omar Sharif, who then shot to stardom with “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago.” He claimed Cairo stopped subsidising his films after his 1973 cult movie Al-Asfur (The Bird) which attributed the Arab defeat in the 1967 war against Israel to the corruption of the political classes at the time.

He also made three highly acclaimed films in the late 1990s — Al-Muhajer (The Emigrant), Al-Masir (Destiny) and Al-Akhar (The Other) — which focused on tolerance and the distinction between Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.

Born in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria on January 25, 1926, he went to a French primary school, on to Victoria College and then briefly to university there before moving to California to study theatre at the Pasadena Playhouse.—AFP