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Tawfik Saleh was the son of a renowned Egyptian physician. He became a film-director from the 1950s onwards, after studying cinema in Paris. His first movie was Darb El Mahabil (‘Alley of Idiots’; 1954-1955), written in collaboration with 1988 Nobel-prize winner and novelist Naguib Mahfouz, and in 1958 he wrote Ihna El-Talamza (‘We are the students’) featuring celebrity actor Omar Al-Sherif. Subsequently directing many other films that were frequently awarded with international prizes, the common thread running through his successful movies is that they all deal with social injustice, underdevelopment, political abuse and class struggle.