Nagy Shaker - The Magical Puppeteer who sometimes designs Cinema posters
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Posted by: ps@filmpaper.com 04/12/2005, 15:04:42 Edit

Nagy Shaker is a household name with the intellectuals of over thirty in most of the Arab World. His puppets are one of the reasons why most of these, can still sing whole scenes from the biggest success of the Egyptian Puppet Theater, "El Leila al Kabira" The big night or the Feast (1960) had lyrics composed by Salah Jahine and a score by Sayed Mekkawi, 2 of the most reapected artists of the sixties in Egypt. He was awarded the second prize for creating the puppets jointly with Mustafa Kamel who had designed the sets at the International Bucharest Festival for Puppets. Nagy had been in love with puppets since he was taken by his father to see Walt Disney's "Pinocchio" when he was 9, it was his first movie and he got completely taken by the magic of puppets. He believes that this is why he picked to present a graduation project involving puppets for the Academy of Fine Arts of Cairo University in 1957 which in turn led him to be involved in the creation of the Egyptian Puppet Theater in 1959, and for its first production "Al Shater Hassan"(Hassan the Brave) he signed the set design and the puppets. After a couple of years in Germany where he was granted Scholarship, he was focused on theater ,mainly puppets, but also set and costume design. He also wrote and directed a puppet show with which he toured for 6 month in Eastern Europe countries. In 1968 , He was awarded another scholarship in Rome this time out of which he came with a diploma (PhD equivalent) in theater scenography from the Fine Arts Academy. However it was the period when the Italian Cinema was recreating itself and within this bubbling atmosphere he started auditing cinema classes, finally in 1972, he decided with a fellow auditor Paolo Isaja to make a movie "Summer of 70" which was awarded by the International Experimental Film Festival of San Marino 1960, in its 1973 edition. Back In Cairo, he kept working in theater productions but also did in 1972 the set and costume design of "Shafiqa wa Metwalli"(1977) with Soad Hosni and Ahmad Zaki. This movie was started by a director then met production problems, was bought by another one who tried his hand at directing it, but shot only one day, and let Ahmad Badrakhan sign it eventually. In 1980, for "Alexandria, why?" Arguably the best movie of Youssef Chahine, he was asked to be the art director for the locations scenes. Eventually he also designed the poster, succeeding in creating a very unusual poster by Egyptian standards. Since then he has been designing few but always remarkable poster, he has also been doing posters for the Ismaeleya short movies festival for the last few years. Uploaded file

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