ABSTRACT
The year of Destiny's release was the year in which Youssef Chahine was given the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award at the Cannes Film Festival, a rare honour, and something which, one might imagine, would have helped him maintain a high profile in the film world. For many, Chahine indeed had such a profile: the best filmmaker from Egypt, home to the longest-lived and most productive film industry in the whole of Africa, his own level of output over forty films in his lifetime, thirty by the time Destiny was released mirrored that of his country, and his films achieved both popular and critical success in varying measure. The 'crime' here is very much on a par with those committed in Destiny, but it is not difficult to imagine what critics might have had to say if Chahine had included an incident of such extraordinary brutality in his film.
