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Under the Sun, Marriage Egyptian Style

Original Release Date 1991

Participant Wiza

Under the Sun, Marriage Egyptian Style is a 1991 BBC worldwide feature film shadowing a matriarch of a family, Wiza, and her three children and their struggles surrounding the customs of matrimony in the Egyptian area. Wiza, the second wife of an Egyptian, in Khan El Khalili right in the bazaar area of Cairo, gives accounts of times spent with friends, neighbors, and relatives as well as explains her role in the family. She, even though the Islamic community would not describe her as one but has taken the role of the Father and Mother. Providing for her family and taking the role of her absent husband while also making sure her children as well-fed educated and taken care of for the future. Reem Saad uses this film to highlight the struggles that women face in the Islamic community since they are not seen as whole unless they are married and combats said stereotypes by using a strong independent woman as Wiza as your main subject of study.

The documentary was written by Reem Saad and produced by Joanna Head.

Reem Saad received her D.Phil. in social anthropology from the University of Oxford in 1994; her thesis title was “Peasants’ Perception of recent Egyptian history”. Her research interests include rural Egypt, historical anthropology, issues of public culture and ethnographic film. She was the Ioma Evans-Pritchard Junior Research Fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, 1993/95. At SRC she is an Associate Research Professor. She is the author of a monograph and a number of articles on village and peasant in contemporary Egypt. She has participated as an anthropologist on the BBC documentary “Marriage Egyptian Style”, 1992, and as assistant director on the documentary “Four Women of Egypt”, produced by the Canadian National Film Board, 1997.
 * 1994: Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, St. Antony’s College, Oxford.
 * 1987: MA in Anthropology, American University in Cairo
 * 1984: BA (with Highest Honours) in Middle East Studies and Minor in Sociology-Anthropology, American University in Cairo
 * 1979: G.C.E. O Level, British Council, Cairo.