Marianne Khoury produces and directs films that engage the audience at an intimate level so they share her passion for controversial themes such as identity, memory, breaking ground, marginalization and social exclusion. Despite an educational background in Economics pursued both in Cairo and Oxford, Marianne gravitated towards the cinema world soon after graduating. For more than three decades, Marianne has been a close collaborator of iconic film maker Youssef Chahine. She is captivated by ‘auteur cinema’, producing independent films that go against the grain of Egyptian cinematic themes. She was instrumental in introducing the first edition of the Panorama of the European Film in Cairo in 2004, an initiative which explores themes and genres in order to present alternative cinema to the Egyptian public and to thrill movie buffs with a rich array of world cinema.
Marianne directed her first documentary film, The Times of Laura, in 1999 followed by Women Who Loved Cinema in 2002, both of which won critical recognition. These two documentaries explore ground breaking work achieved by renegade women in Egypt nearly a century ago. Marianne is deeply committed to telling the story of people, both men and women, who have no voice. Her last project, Zelal, focused on individual and societal perceptions of the mentally ill, raising questions about the concept of madness itself. Zelal received critical acclaim and was an official entry in the Venice Film Festival 2010 and won the FIPRESCI at the Dubai Film Festival of the same year.