The 9th edition of El Gouna Film Festival (Oct. 15-23) may be celebrating Mona Zaki’s past, but the Egyptian film star is far more interested in what she’s yet to do. Honored with the festival’s Career Achievement Award at the opening ceremony, Zaki, who has already built a career spanning more than three decades, hasn’t even turned 50. Sitting down with Variety on the shores of the Red Sea, she speaks about that prolific career less as a completed body of work than a continuous process of reinvention.
That ongoing transformation has required her to repeatedly shed audiences’ expectations of who Mona Zaki should be. Looking back, Zaki says two lessons in particular stand out: learning the power of saying “no” and finding the confidence and willingness to express herself, both personally and emotionally. The latter, she confides, was something acting itself helped teach her.
Part of your healing is saying what you feel.” Zaki entered the industry young, first in theater, before moving into television and, ultimately, the silver screen. Early on, she became closely associated with the “girl next door,” an image that increasingly felt at odds with both the woman she was becoming and the kinds of characters she wanted to explore. I needed to shift.” That turning point came with Yousry Nasrallah’s 2009 drama “Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story” (Ehky Ya Shahrazad), written by the late Wahid Hamed, which saw Zaki take on the role of a television host whose program examines the experiences of women navigating romance, health, everyday life, and the expectations placed upon them by Egyptian society.
The departure from Zaki’s familiar screen persona drew intense backlash, with audiences questioning what had happened to the “girl next door” they had come to know. The response shook her enough that she turned to Hamed with concerns about facing the film’s promotional tour. He encouraged her to stand behind a choice she had made out of love for the work, advice that helped Zaki confront the resistance to seeing her move beyond the roles that had defined her early career.
For Zaki, the experience marked the beginning of a struggle that has followed her throughout her career, that of finding roles that allow women to address subjects Egyptian cinema has historically treated as difficult or off-limits. It can be very difficult to find a meaningful script.” While she believes the landscape has advanced over more than 30 years, Zaki remains deeply frustrated by the gap between the talent of Egypt’s actresses and the opportunities afforded them. You work on it like any other relationship in your life,” she explains.
Part of that relationship, she believes, means establishing boundaries around her freedom to evolve as an artist. She works with an acting coach on every project, drawing on different techniques to construct the character’s history. One of the most important parts of that process, she explains, is imagining a character’s life before the audience ever meets her.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
