Salma El Tarzi

• @Salma_El_Tarzi

Salma El Tarzi is a Cairo-based filmmaker, visual artist and essayist. Her independent directorial debut, Do You Know Why? (2004), won the Rotterdam Arab Film Festival Silver Award. 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 graphic novel on institutional and societal gender-based violence during the first years of the 2011 uprising in Egypt to be released in 2021. Since then, she has authored another autobiographical artist book 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: Yataman Wa Honna El Raghebat (They refuse but they want).