Chahine, Chaos, and Cinema – a Revolutionary Coda Yusuf Chahine, Egypt’s most well-known and decorated director died in 2008 at age 82. Chahine made 42 films spanning a six-decade career. His work runs the gamut from social realism to melodrama, musical comedy to operetta and grand historical spectacle. He resisted easy compartmentalization, often confounding critics and viewers by mixing genres and moods within single films. In his final film, Hiyya Fawda, which was completed by his protégé, Khalid Yusuf, he returned to a favorite theme, Egypt’s national predicament, dispensing with his recent propensity to couch his criticism in allegorical/historical garb. This paper reads Chahine’s final film as a coda to his career, situating Hiyya Fawda and highlighting several key themes – political corruption and state brutality, sexual longing and deviancy – that reference, sometimes directly, his earlier classic work. Hiyya Fawda is at the same time a film that complements a revival of powerful social-political drama that is being produced by younger filmmakers, including Khalid Yusuf. And so this paper will need to read Chahine’s final film as part of an ongoing cinematic project in an evolving industry. Above all, Chahine’s conceptualization of Egypt in chaos – dispensing allegory and parable for a story set in contemporary Cairo – marks him as a prescient observer and even now a bit of an oracle. Hiyya Fawda will hereafter be viewed through the lenses of the January 2011 upheaval that has rocked Egypt and the Arab world. Chahine could not have predicted the popular demonstrations, but he clearly imagined them and sought to explore their roots, realistically and symbolically. The ending of his final film may be typically sentimental, but it is certainly less unbelievable than when the filming ended and the filmmaker gave his last directions.