Menna Shalabi

Her film debut in The Magician (2001) with Mahmoud Abdel Aziz launched a steady rise. She followed with I Love Cinema (2004) and Best of Times (2004), but her international profile grew with Youssef Chahine's Chaos, This Is (2007), which screened at Venice and Toronto. Microphone (2010) won Best Arabic-language Film at the Cairo International Film Festival. Her collaboration with Yousry Nasrallah on After the Battle (2012) marked Egyptian cinema's return to Cannes after 15 years away, and their later Brooks, Meadows and Lovely Faces (2016) premiered at Locarno. In Nawara (2015), directed by Hala Khalil, she earned a record ten best actress awards. She then starred in Marwan Hamed's The Originals (2017) and Diamond Dust (2018), the latter a box-office hit that brought her awards at the Arabian Cinema Awards and the Arab Star Festival. She also supported emerging filmmakers, taking the lead in Adam Abd Elghaffar's short Fork and Knife (2018), which competed at El Gouna Film Festival.

Her television work has been just as notable. The series Every Week Has a Friday earned her an International Emmy nomination, making her the first Egyptian ever nominated. She also starred in Friendly Fire (2013), Jewish Quarter (2015), and Sunset Oasis (2017), which won her the Critic's Award for Best Actress at the Arab Satellite Channels Festival. Away from acting, she has participated in charity initiatives for persons with disabilities. She has served on juries at the Cairo International Film Festival, Carthage, Malmö, and El Gouna. Her many honors include the Faten Hamama Excellence Award from the Cairo International Film Festival. In 2022, she was arrested at Cairo airport on drug possession charges and later received a suspended sentence. She is single and has never been married, and she practices Islam. She is 5'6" with a slim build and brown eyes. Her career spans 26 years, from 2000 to the present. She works on. Short sentences. That's it.