سلمى الطرزي

Salma El Tarzi (b. 1978) is a Cairo-based filmmaker, visual artist and essayist. Since her graduation from the High Institute of Cinema in 1999, where she studied cartoon animation, she has worked across several fields within the film and television industries, including direction, production, dubbing and writing. Her independent directorial debut, Do You Know Why? (2004), a short documentary film about young models working in television advertising, won the Rotterdam Arab Film Festival Silver Award that year. She has since continued working in commercial cinema, predominantly as a producer, while simultaneously pursuing a career as an independent documentary filmmaker. In 2013, she directed her first feature-length documentary, Underground/On The Surface, which explores the local subculture of electro-shaabi music (also known as Mahraganat) and won the 2013 Dubai International Film Festival award for best directing. That year, she returned to painting and drawing after a 14-year-long hiatus, culminating in the completion of a co-authored nonfiction Women of Tahrir, a graphic novel on institutional and societal gender-based violence during the first years of the 2011 uprising in Egypt (to be released in 2022). She has since authored another autobiographical artist book, Mohawala Letazakor Waghy An Attempt to Remember My face that was launched in February 2020, in parallel to an ongoing research project about the representation of desire and normalization of rape culture in mainstream Egyptian cinema: Yatama Wa Honna El Raghebat They refuse but they want. The first iteration of the latter work-in-progress was a video installation shown as part of the Goethe-Institut Cairo's feminist arts festival Tashweesh in November 2018, published in Mada Masr and turned into a short video essay for JEEM platform in 2019. The final iteration is a book to be released in 2023.