Variety award for Yousry Nasrallah

Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah was awarded the Middle East Filmmaker of the Year award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF) on Monday. He got the award by Variety, a leading American magazine, for his latest film, Baad El-Mawkea (After the Battle), which is about the aftermath of the Battle of the Camel during the Egyptian Revolution.
 The film stars Menna Shalaby and Baseem Samra. Samra portrays impoverished Pyramids tour guide Mahmoud. He is coerced into taking part in the brutal attack on anti-government demonstrators in Tahrir Square. He is badly beaten by protesters and afterwards he and his family are taunted and ridiculed because the attack is widely thought to have been instigated by agents of the Mubarak regime.
Nasrallah, born in Egypt in 1952, said the men who took part in the attack, mostly tour guides from the Pyramids area, were easy targets for those who wanted to exploit them. "They were extremely worried about their livelihood. Revolution means no more tourists, it means hunger. So they were easily manipulated and pushed into battles that were not theirs," Nasrallah told Reuters.
 Baad El-Mawkea first debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, making Nasrallah the first Arab director to participate at Cannes' official competition after the late Youssef Chahine. Nasrallah's other works include the 2009 film Sheherazade, Tell me a Story and The City, which won the special jury prize at Locarno in 1999.  His first film, Sarikat Sayfeya (Summer Thefts), was shown in 1988 in the parallel director section of the Cannes festival.