- Born
- Maher Sabry was born in Cairo, Egypt to an upper middle-class family. and attended the elite Victoria college, a prestigious private school which has been attended by many Arab and Egyptian celebrities like film directors Yousef Chahine, and Shady Abdel Salam, Actors Omar Shereif, Ahmed Ramzy, and Samir Sabri. Later, Sabry earned an Bachelor of Arts, (1993) in English literature and drama from Cairo University. After graduation, he acted in, co-wrote and directed several plays as well as starring in student movies and independent films. He also worked teaching children drama, Arts and English, publishing cartoons and publishing poetry. In 1998 he wrote and directed his play "The Harem" where he "was the first director to portray gay and lesbian love in lyrical and sympathetic manner on stage, in fact in the Egyptian media as a whole..." (Arts and the Islamic World, vol. 35). His work as a gay activist for Egyptian LGBTQ, including his work covering the notorious Queen Boat arrests of 2001, earned him the Felipa De Souza Award, in 2002. He studied Cinema in San Francisco where he has made several short films and a documentary. "Toul Omry" is his first feature length narrative movie.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Ahmed Khalil
- We all build fences around ourselves to protect ourselves from pain; that's why it's easy, when we see others treated unjustly, to assume that they must have done something to deserve punishment. It's especially easy if they believe differently from us or live a lifestyle we don't approve of. Then it comes round to us, and others say the same.. and so on until we all know what it feels like to be oppressed.
- Censorship is a knife in the heart of any artistic movement. The censor treats me like a child, telling me, as a person, what to read, what to hear, what to watch, and therefore how to think, how to express myself. All this is done in the name of "protecting the public interest" but in fact it is "protecting power-holders and political interests.
- We're now living in an age of cultural regression, an age where dissidents, presidential candidates and religious minorities are thrown into jail. We claim to be emulating Islamic civilization; but if the people who built that civilization were alive today, there would have been fatwas [religious edicts] pronounced against them, and their books and other works would have been burned.
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