Egyptian Film Posters:
A Design Reference

Since 1927, the visual exposure to the film-poster industry in Egypt created a new reference for design in the Arab world. This linked design in Egypt to its history, politics, and popular culture. With their vibrant graphics, famous cultural elements, and social reflection, film posters are of great relevance to the Arab world and are considered treasured reflections of the past. The film industry changed the visual culture of Egypt completely, particularly in Downtown Cairo, where cinemas and theaters were prevalent. This emerging visual culture invaded the Arab world, and Egyptian films captured the imagination of Arab audiences all around the world. Cinema became a strong vehicle for expressing political agendas and for reflecting the social, cultural, and economic status of Egypt. People were observing new ways of illustrating images and writing Arabic script. The posters were witnesses to the evolution of different illustration styles that advertised the new faces of heroes and heroines that would appear on the silver screen.

Speaker: Haytham Nawar is a practicing artist and designer, as well as a scholar in the fields of art and design. Nawar has built his professional and academic career over the past two decades, simultaneously fulfilling the different roles. His extensive experience spans continents as he worked at the Ionian Centre for Art and Culture in Kefalonia, Greece, and taught at Polytechnic University’s School of Design in Hong Kong in the department of communication design. In 2014, he pursued his academic career as an assistant professor of design at the American University in Cairo (AUC), where he served as the director of the graphic design program from 2016 to 2019, before holding the post of the chair of the department of the arts at AUC. Besides his academic career, Nawar is the founding director of Cairotronica, Cairo International Electronic and New Media Arts Festival in Egypt. Cairotronica is a bi-annual festival that has taken place in Cairo since 2016.