The second edition of the Sharm El-Sheikh Arab and European Film Festival is scheduled to premiere the Egyptian documentary “Boody, the Sumo Pharaoh,” a documentary about an Egyptian sumo wrestler.
Organised by the Noon Foundation for Arts and Culture, the festival will run from 3-9 March.
Directed by Sarah Riad, a 25-year-old Egyptian-Japanese filmmaker, scriptwriter, and director, who always writes and produces her own works, the documentary will be screened in the festival’s long feature films section.
Boody (Abdelrahman Sha’lan), known by his wrestling name “Osunaarashi” (the great sand storm), is the first Sumo wrestler of his kind ever to make it to the professional Sumo world in Japan. He is celebrated for being one of the most noted, strong wrestlers in the top Sumo ranks. The documentary brings out Boody’s journey from Al-Bagalt, a small village in the countryside of Egypt where he grew up, all the way to Tokyo, right into the one-of-a-kind professional Sumo world.
The 60-minute documentary previously won the Best Feature Documentary award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival in 2017. It also took part in several international film festivals in Poland, the United States, and Germany.
Riad is a director who was born to an Egyptian father and a Japanese mother. She joined two universities in Japan and Egypt to study mass communications. However, she dropped out of both and started her career as a filmmaker and writer in 2012.
She wrote and directed the short film “Bela Rouh” (Without A Soul) which won an award at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth in Seattle.
