Ikhtifa’aat Soad Hosni el-Thalaathat
(The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni)
Rania Stephan | Lebanon 2011 | 70 min. 
Material: VHS
Format: BluRay
Original language: Arabic
Script: Rania Stephan
Editing: Rania Stephan
Sound: Rania Stephan
With Soad Hosni
Production: Joun Films
Print/Sales: Joun Films
Awards: Sharjah Biennial Prize 2011, Renaud Victor Prize, FID Marseille 2011
German Premiere
Soad Hosni : an adored icon of the Egyptian cinema, an actress in almost one hundred films who was born in Cairo in 1943 and who committed suicide in London in 2001.
It is the life story of this star that is created solely from bits of films Hosni appeared in. With no other image than those Hosni presented to the camera, without commentary nor voice other than her own and those of her partners, this is, in short, Soad Hosni by herself. The actress is an ideal vehicle for circulating between imagination and reality, and her cinema, more than a dream factory, is a revelation. Soad Hosni’s body fills the screen with her glory, and her films, which are mostly VHS copies, in tactile and worn material, feed this beautiful meditation with all the embodiment needed to maintain the presence of her remarkable melancholy. – Nicolas Fédoroff, FID Marseille
Rania Stephan, born in Beirut , graduated with a degree in Cinema Studies from Latrobe University in Melbourne, Australia and a graduate degree in Cinema Studies from Paris 8 University, France. Her career in film production has been long and diverse: she has worked as a sound engineer, camera, editor, first assistant and producer with renowned filmmakers including Simone Bitton and Elia Suleiman.
Films (selection): Tribe 1993 | Phaedra(s) 1994 | Attempt at Jealousy 1995 | Baal and Death 1997 | My First Camera 1998 | Wastelands 2005 | Lebanon/War 2006 | The Three Disppearances of Suad Hosni 2011